#Revolution Quotes

“There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.”

“Revolutions go not backward.”

“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?”

“Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.”

“Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.”

“The seed of revolution is repression.”

“Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the distemper's that make an ordered life impossible.”

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

“People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately.”

“A little revolution is a good thing.”

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

“It is a protest against the way the world has worked. (explanation of Bolshevism)”

“The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

“If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence.”

“All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.”

“Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. An insurrection has consequently begun of science talents and courage against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt. It has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will soon recover from the panic of this first catastrophe.”

“Every generation needs a new revolution.”

“Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”

“One revolution is like one cocktail, it just gets you organized for the next.”

“If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's.”

“The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!”

“The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.”

“It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.”

“Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.”

“The most excellent symbol of the people is the paving stone. One walks on it until it falls on one's head.”

“Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

“Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”

“There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.”

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

“Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men”

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”

“Being myself a warm zealot for the attainment & enjoiment by all mankind of as much liberty as each may exercise without injury to the equal liberty of his fellow citizens, I have lamented that in France the endeavors to obtain this should have been attended with the effusion of so much blood.”

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

“A torch lighted in the forests of America set all Europe in conflagration.”

“The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.”

“Everything I see about me is sowing the seeds of a revolution that is inevitable, though I shall not have the pleasure of seeing it. The lightning is so close at hand that it will strike at the first chance, and then there will be a pretty uproar. The young are fortunate, for they will see fine things.”

“Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It’s the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.”

“History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.”

“Revolution is the larva of civilization.”

“Do you hear the people sing Lost in the valley of the night? It is the music of a people Who are climbing to the light. For the wretched of the earth There is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest night will end And the sun will rise.”

“I represent a party which does not yet exist: the party Revolution-Civilization. This party will make the twentieth century. There will issue from it first the United States of Europe, then the United States of the World.”

“One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.”

“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.”

“Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.”

“When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.”

“If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.”

“To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.”

“History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.”

“Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.”