Archive

Quotes

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1776

Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.

—Italo Calvino, 1957

Insurgents are like conquerors: they must go forward; the moment they are stopped, they are lost.

—Duke of Wellington, c. 1819

The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.

—François Guizot, 1830

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977

Revolutions never go backward.

—Thomas Skidmore, 1829

To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church; the third is the social revolution.

—Mikhail Bakunin, 1871

The peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms. 

—Frantz Fanon, 1961

I have been ever of the opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

—Erich Fromm, 1941

Revolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles. 

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man, not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

—Jean Genet, 1983

If not us, who? If not now, when?

—Czech slogan, 1989