Revolution Quotes
Lenin has the most entries, followed by Che Guevara, Abbie Hoffman, Mao and Marx. Three sourced lines come from different directions. Bakunin, in 1868, describes a revolution organized from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre. Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom (1941), says the successful revolutionary is a statesman and the unsuccessful one a criminal. Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Dispossessed (1974), says you cannot buy the Revolution or make it, you can only be it.
Flagged: Samuel Adams is credited with a line about an irate, tireless minority setting brush fires, and Henry Ford with one about revolution before morning if people knew about the money system. Both are marked misattributed. A disputed line about a National-Socialist revolution is credited to Hitler.
Most quoted on revolution:
Men do not lead the revolution; it is the Revolution that uses men.
Democracy finds its radical edge in the great revolutions of the past.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
Revolutionaries do not take to the path of spilling blood easily.
By abolishing the ethic of production you enter revolutionary reality directly.
A Revolution is nothing other than the replacement of one given type of Authority with another.
One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth.
I know and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backwards.