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:
No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.
The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution.
When a people, having become free, establish wise laws, their revolution is complete.
Change has no constituency—and a perceived revolution has even less.
A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.
Scipio would sooner have gone on without the revolution than the other way around.
Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.
Whoever finishes a revolution only halfway, digs his own grave.
Revolution is like the daughters of Pelias: it cuts humanity to pieces in order to rejuvenate it.
There’s just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that’s a police revolution.
The revolution itself originates from a dream of the future or from the craving for a new life.