quotations about revolution
In my view the time for rousing revolutionary literature has passed, because the revolution has already revolutionised itself to death and has left behind only bitterness and a sort of weariness, listlessness and even nausea.
GAO XINGJIAN
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Cold Literature", The Case for Literature
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
C. S. LEWIS
The World's Last Night
Revolutions are sometimes necessary, even sometimes glorious, but only rarely successful in effecting essential permanent change. Anarchy, a culture without a government, without an established order, is never safe or productive for the general populace.
RICHARD DELONG
"Is establishment a poison pill", Chillicothe Gazette, February 12, 2016
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up.
HANNAH ARENDT
"Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary", Crises of the Republic
That humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
Revolutions are never pleasant or pretty. Dismantling a power structure is like dismantling a bomb. Embarrassment and confusion fill the air.
RAVIT HECHT
"There Are No Pretty Revolutions", Haaretz, November 10, 2017
The revolution has overthrown the monarchy, true! But perhaps this means that the revolution simply has driven the skin disease inside the organism.
MAXIM GORKY
Untimely Thoughts
If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
JEAN GENET
The Balcony
The history of the human race always has been, and most likely always will be, that of evolution and revolution.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
NORMAN MAILER
Barbary Shore
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Remarks on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, March 13, 1962
The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
Freedom from Fear
It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. But when it comes it moves irresistibly.
VLADIMIR LENIN
speech at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, August 23, 1918
First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I'm inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word "revolution" loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind.
MALCOLM X
Message to the Grass Roots, November 10, 1963
Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are new worlds born.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
"Statism and Anarchy"
Left and right, the sour mood of the country burns for a true political and economic rebellion. It may well happen. But look for it out on the streets, not in the hollow rituals of these elections.
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
"When Chivalry Fails: St. Bernard and the Machine", Counterpunch, February 5, 2016
So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
It Can't Happen Here
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Great Day", Last Poems