Archive

Quotes

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

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

—Leo Tolstoy, 1893

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871

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

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

—Henry Clay, 1842

Revolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles. 

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

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

—Edmund Burke, 1790

Revolutions are always verbose.

—Leon Trotsky, 1933

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

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.

—Italo Calvino, 1957

All revolutions devour their own children.

—Ernst Röhm, 1933

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

—Czech slogan, 1989

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

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844