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.

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.

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

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

And then, sir, there is this consideration: that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up and, claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

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

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

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.