It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
—Dolores Ibárruri, 1936Quotes
The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.
—François Guizot, 1830Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.
—Italo Calvino, 1957Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790I have been ever of the opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844Disobedience, 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, 1891All 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, 1977The 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, 1961The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1983