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Quotes

To cast aside obedience, and by popular violence to incite revolt, is treason, not against man only, but against God.

—Pope Leo XIII, 1885

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

—Havelock Ellis, 1921

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

—Dolores Ibárruri, 1936

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

—Duke of Wellington, c. 1819

Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.

—Edmund Burke, 1790

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1983

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and through rebellion.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

Revolutions never go backward.

—Thomas Skidmore, 1829

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the state.

—Albert Camus, 1951

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

—Erich Fromm, 1941

Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power.

—Leo Tolstoy, 1893

If there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.

—Thomas Paine, 1778