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Quotes

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

And then, sir, there is this consideration: that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up and, claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

—Samuel Johnson, 1791

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

Who draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard.

—James Howell, 1659

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

—Victor Hugo, 1862

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

—François Guizot, 1830

Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.

—Tennessee Williams, 1944

An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.

—Henry Clay, 1842

All men recognize the right of revolution, that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1849

Revolutions never go backward.

—Thomas Skidmore, 1829

The only justification of rebellion is success.

—Thomas B. Reed, 1878

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1776

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

—Edmund Burke, 1790