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Revolution Quotes

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Revolution Quotes

“It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions.”

Source: Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution

“How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: The Renaissance pencilled in for right after the Dark Ages. The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Post-Modern Era, then The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.”

“I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.”

Source: General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money

“By definition, revolutions are not linear, one step at a time, event A leading to event B, and so on. Many causes operate on each other at once. Revolutions shift into place suddenly, like the pattern in a kaleidoscope. They do not so much proceed as crystallize.”

Causes Steps Events Revolution Patterns Definitions Linear One Step At A Time Kaleidoscope

Book:The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s

“If you have compassion for society, only then will the events of your life, sow seeds of revolution in it.”

Ifs Compassion Events Revolution Empowerment India Seeds

Author:Narendra Modi

“Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history.”

States Events Masters Revolution Rose Slave Western Haiti

Author:Madison Smartt Bell

“Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skinsand furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.”

Want Long War Use Interesting Events Revolution Habit Incapable Accustomed Fur American Revolution Tolerable Cherokee

Author:Thomas Jefferson

“Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies,omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every pagewe soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated.”

“In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despitethe fact that the American Revolution was successful--realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime--while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.”

“The die is cast. The people have passed the river and cut away the bridge. Last night three cargoes of tea were emptied into the harbor. This is the grandest event which has ever yet happened since the controversy with Britain opened.”

People Lasts Night Dies Three Cutting Happened Events Revolution Rivers Casts Tea Bridges Britain Controversy Last Night Harbors American Revolution

Book:The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations

Source: The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations

“Whenever an important event, a revolution, or a calamity turns to the profit of the church, such is always signalised as the Finger of God.”

Important Turns Church Atheism Events Revolution Fingers Profit Positive Atheism Calamity Important Events

Author:Voltaire

“Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution”

Mother Events Revolution Invention Printing Gutenberg

Author:Victor Hugo

“The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.”

“I think anytime we talk about transforming in capitalist society, we are talking about a process not a particular event so you can't talk about a socialist revolution.”

Thinking Process Talking Events Particular Revolution Capitalist Socialist Transforming

Author:Cornel West

“In the event of a violent revolution, we would be sorely outnumbered. And when it was all over, the Negro would face the same unchanged conditions, the same squalor and deprivation-the only difference being that his bitterness would be even more intense, his disenchantment even more abject. Thus, in purely practical as well as moral terms, the American Negro has no rational alternative to nonviolence.”

“I do think that our culture or our psyche as a country I guess, the world or whatever, we're due for a huge event. We're due for a little bit of a revolution or a spotlight or a movement. Something that feels large, something that feels like the 60s. Some sort of unification.”

Thinking World Feels Littles Country Culture Bits Events Movement Huge Revolution Little Bit Dues Spotlight Unification

Author:Justin Vernon

“I always tell people that a revolution is not an event, it's a process. It is a struggle. And it doesn't usually go smoothly.”

People Process Struggle Events Revolution

Author:Bassem Youssef

“The fact is that philosophy has been a decisive source of inspiration in all the great crises that Europe has faced. It has been so in the time that preceded the fall of the Roman Empire, when Augustine of Hippo delineated the features of a new spiritual civilization; in the age of religious wars, when Descartes and Hobbes established the principles of modern science and politics; and at the turn of the French Revolution, interpreted by Kant and Hegel as an event destined to change the history of the world.”

“Only the defeat of the proletariat in Germany in 1923 gave the decisive push to the creation of Stalin's theory of national socialism: the downward curve of the revolution gave rise to Stalinism, not to the theory of the permanent revolution, which was first formulated by me in 1905. This theory is not bound to a definite calendar of revolutionary events; it only reveals the world-wide interdependence of the revolutionary process.”

World Firsts Process Events Creation Theory Revolution Bounds Defeat Wide Socialism Permanent Revolutionary Germany Definite Curves Calendars Interdependence Proletariat Stalinism

Author:Leon Trotsky

“There are very interesting books about these events, for instance one by a very well-known American historian named William R. Polk called Violent Politics. It's a record of what are basically guerrilla wars from the American Revolution right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Wells Book War Interesting Known Records Events Revolution Iraq Violent Instance Historian Afghanistan Well Known Very Interesting American Revolution Guerrillas Interesting Book

Author:Noam Chomsky

“What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.”

War Shows Government Streets Events Revolution Mass Raised Civil War Protest Replacements

Author:Jonathan Sacks

“Revolution is not a one time event.”

Events Revolution One Time

Author:Audre Lorde

“No Man has a more perfect reliance on the all-wise and powerful dispensations of the Supreme Being than I have, nor thinks his aid more necessary...The man must be bad indeed who can look upon the events of the American Revolution without feeling the warmest gratitude towards the great Author of the Universe whose divine interposition was so frequently manifested in our behalf....In war He directed the sword, and in peace, He has ruled in our councils.”

Thinking Men Looks War Feelings Universe Perfect Powerful Wise Events Divine Revolution Gratitude Aids Supreme Behalf Council Reliance American Revolution Supreme Being Great Author

Author:George Washington

“[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.”

“History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions.”

People World Years Has Beens Today Remember Process Decision Events Revolution Subtle Making Decisions Irrevocable

Author:John Green

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”

Source: The writings of Thomas Jefferson: being his autobiography, correspondence, reports, messages, addresses, and other writings, official and private