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Quotes

Rebellion is no less a sin than divination.

—Book of Samuel, c. 550 BC

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

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

—Pope Leo XIII, 1885

Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.

—Tennessee Williams, 1944

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

—Thomas Paine, 1778

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

All revolutions devour their own children.

—Ernst Röhm, 1933

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1776

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

—Leo Tolstoy, 1893

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

—Edmund Burke, 1790

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

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