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Quotes

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

—Edmund Burke, 1790

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man, not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

—Jean Genet, 1983

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

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1776

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. 

—Pierre Boulez, 1989

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

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

The only justification of rebellion is success.

—Thomas B. Reed, 1878

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

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
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