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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:

Listz was undoubtedly encouraged in his revolutionary aims by Wagner's fiery courage.

Walter Raymond Spalding Music: An Art and a Language (1920)

He [Obama] lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!

Donald Trump

If we do not weed the present body of corruption, bribery, perfunctoriness, and ignorance, and establish instead a clean and efficient administration, the day will soon come when the revolution will be started against us.

Chiang Kai-shek

The Red Guards and other revolutionary organizations of the young people in the colleges and middle schools are the shook force fighting in the van in the great cultural revolution, and a powerful reserve force of the People’s Liberation Army.

Lin Biao

Generally, a revolution isn't enough. For me, it's changing one chaos for another. The important thing is to know that which from this moment is to be constructed.

Raquel Jodorowsky

Let us be under no illusion. The Jewish spirit which was responsible for the alliance of large-scale capital with Marxism and was the driving force behind so many anti-Spanish revolutionary agreements, will not be got rid of in a day.

Francisco Franco

What's crazy is the idea that revolutionaries must shoot and bomb and kill, that revolution is the same as war. (p305)

Maxine Hong Kingston Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)

"There won’t be any revolution in America," said Isadore. Nikitin agreed. "The people are all too clean. They spend all their time changing their shirts and washing themselves. You can’t feel fierce and revolutionary in a bathroom."

Eric Linklater Juan in America (1931)

The revolution, Stahl declared, is the ‘world-historic mark of our age.’ It would found ‘the entire State on the will of man instead of on the commandment and ordinance of God.’ p. 364

Herbert Marcuse Reason and Revolution, Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941)

There is no revolution like the Communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change.

Ai Weiwei

Globalisation is a great thing, and the genie's out of the bottle; it's called the Information Revolution. It has a promise to bring opportunity and information to all corners of the world. It's a wonderful thing.

Krist Novoselic

I had to decide [he said later] whether I would be a lawyer by profession and a revolutionary at intervals, or a revolutionary by profession and a lawyer at intervals.

Eleftherios Venizelos

Stealthily the computer advanced, vanguard of the technological revolution, hailed as the cure for all mankind's ills and denounced as the baleful force which would first enslave and then destroy us all.

Bernard Levin

I see a future for us only in a Great War in which we lastingly cripple an opponent, France or Russia. Unless there should be a great war, the only way out of our dilemma will be through internal commotion, preferably revolutions in France or Russia.

Alfred von Waldersee

Many desire it. We are a slack people but deeply destructive. Should there be a revolution, only God knows where it will end. I think that a constitutional regime would mean the end of Russia. We need a despot!

Mikhail Tukhachevsky

I alone bear the responsibility. But I am not a criminal because of that. If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the revolution. There is no such thing as high treason against the traitors of 1918.

Adolf Hitler

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Theodore Kaczynski Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions.

Denis Diderot

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

Simone Weil Gravity and Grace (1947)

All revolutions in modern times, Camus points out, have led to a reinforcement of the power of the State.

Herbert Read Foreword (1956)

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