Archive

Quotes

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

Rebellion is no less a sin than divination.

—Book of Samuel, c. 550 BC

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

—Pope Leo XIII, 1885

There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1665

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

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

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. 

—Pierre Boulez, 1989

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1861

Governments are not overthrown by the poor, who have no power, but by the rich—when they are insulted by their inferiors and cannot obtain justice.

—Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BC

Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.

—Tennessee Williams, 1944

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

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844

Revolutions never go backward.

—Thomas Skidmore, 1829

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

—Leo Tolstoy, 1893