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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.

Random quote on Revolution

Most quoted on revolution:

None of these countries had revolutions with bloody casualties and there was no civil war in any of the republics... Russia had to change and it did change.

Boris Yeltsin

WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA? Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there.

Donald Trump

The revolution will not be televised
The revolution is here

Common Like Water for Chocolate (2000)

We realized at a very early point in our development that revolution is a process. It is not a particular action, nor is it a conclusion. It is a process.

Huey P. Newton

Conclusion: Because humanity has entered a new era of science and industry, Ecumenopolis is as inevitable as the village after the agricultural revolution.

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis

The decline of the churches was a sweeping social revolution, because they had done more than any other institution, public or private, to civilise Australians.

Geoffrey Blainey A Shorter History of Australia (1994)

The Revolution is dead. Long Live the Revolution

Li Minqi The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy (2008)

We believed that the women’s struggle for equality was the ‘revolution within the revolution.’

Iris Morales Through the Eyes of Rebel Women: The Young Lords, 1969-1976 (2016)

Sobriety means efficiency, and "efficiency" movements have in all ages been the incubators in which revolutions were hatched.

Kate Richards O'Hare Booze and Revolution (1915)

We need women to have self-confidence that they can change, that this is the revolution we need and this is the revolution we deserve.

Nadia Makram Ebeid

Revolution has strict rules and tight deadlines. (26 September 1993)

Marcello Pera

We have many big projects that would have helped our industrial revolution, but instability in the political leadership has been a major setback.

Olatokunbo Somolu

This is not a visible revolution and it is not political.

Buckminster Fuller Norie Huddle interview (1981)

You may have made a Revolution, but not a Reformation. You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover'd freedom.

Edmund Burke

The American Revolution was not a common event.

John Adams What do we mean by the American Revolution? (1818)

The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

Maximilien Robespierre On Political Morality (1794)

There will be violence, riots and revolutions. Governments will fall and anarchy will prevail.

Mahathir Mohamad

Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.

Murray Bookchin Desire and Need (1967)

The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980's was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Extremes (1992)

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.

Gary Snyder Buddhism and the Coming Revolution (1961)

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