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Quotes

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

No one makes a revolution by himself, and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

—George Sand, 1851

Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.

—Italo Calvino, 1957

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

—François Guizot, 1830

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

Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

—Wendell Phillips, 1859

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

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

—Czech slogan, 1989

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

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1983

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

—Germaine Greer, 1970

I began revolution with eighty-two men. If I had to do it again, I do it with ten or fifteen and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.

 

—Fidel Castro, 1959

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

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

—Edmund Burke, 1790