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, 1851Quotes
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
—Victor Hugo, 1862All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
—Havelock Ellis, 1921Revolutions never go backward.
—Thomas Skidmore, 1829There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 63 BCRebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1776Governments 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.
—Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BCRevolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871