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:
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.
Critical threshold-crossing of the inevitable revolution is already underway.
It's time for a revolution, but probably not in the terms that people imagine it.
A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.
It’s pretty obvious to everyone that the revolution has happened.
Before the great civil revolution there will be a deepening of the crisis of this obsolete order.
Passivity writhes in resistance to the progressive impulse of revolution.
Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution.
The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.