Governments are not overthrown by the poor, who have no power, but by the rich—when they are insulted by their inferiors and cannot obtain justice.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

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.

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. 

The 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. 

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

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.