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:

A time will come when the people will understand their power and the pigs' machinery will be unable to accommodate their demands. That is when the people, black people and poor white people and oppressed people all over America will rise up like mighty tide and clean this beachfront of capitalism and racism, and make the revolution.

Elaine Brown A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (1992)

As the peoples always move,—as Life, which is greater than the peoples, always moves. And the business of the revolutionist, the Seeker for the Changes of Old Forms, the dreamer of Liberty and Plenty, is to be with them in their struggle, in their victory, in their defeat, whenever, wherever, the people rise.

Voltairine de Cleyre The Mexican Revolt (1911)

To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.

Antonio Gramsci

The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.

Bell hooks

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

Gloria Steinem Moving Beyond Words (1994)