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

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.

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.

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.

Insurgents are like conquerors: they must go forward; the moment they are stopped, they are lost.

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.

An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

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