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Quotes

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

—Jean Genet, 1983

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

—Dolores Ibárruri, 1936

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

—Edmund Burke, 1790

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

—Havelock Ellis, 1921

To cast aside obedience, and by popular violence to incite revolt, is treason, not against man only, but against God.

—Pope Leo XIII, 1885

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.

—Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BC

There 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, 1665

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

—Czech slogan, 1989

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. 

—Frantz Fanon, 1961
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