Quotessence
Home / Topics / Revolution Quotes

Revolution Quotes

Browse 4097 quotes about Revolution.

Related topics

Revolution Quotes

“Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born.”

“Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no indsturial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.”

“We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out We invented the Revolution but we don't know how to run it Look everyone wants to keep something from the past a souvenir of the old regime This man decides to keep a painting This one keeps his mistress He [ pointing ] keeps his garden He [ pointing ] keeps his estate He keeps his country house He keeps his factories This man couldn't part with his shipyards This one kept his army and that one keeps his king”

“The complete emancipation of women from the ties which held them back in the past, during the ages of despotism and ignorance, is a basic aim of the Party and the Revolution. Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.”

“Any proposals for the future, while they should use to the full the experience gathered in the past, should not be restricted by consideration of sectional interests established in the obtaining of that experience. Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world's history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.”

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

“The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.”

“The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers. Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century - medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing, the computer. The people who created these things - the doers - are not popular heroes. Our heroes are the talkers who complain about the doers.”

“That's absolutely true, but one problem with the digital revolution, which may tie into what I said earlier, is that there can be a collapse of quality. You may not have liked the decisions made by publishers in the past, you may not have liked the decisions made by magazine editors or newspaper editors in the past. At least there was some quality control”

“Maybe Italians are a bit less restrained: they can be less rigid and sometimes they stray a little in their ways of dressing for work, which is something that is always linked to the formal suit. What we like of both Italians and the British is that they love to dress well. In the past ten years we have witnessed a revolution in the menswear market.”

“Japan had a more radical experience of future shock than any other nation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. They were this feudal place, locked in the past, but then they bought the whole Industrial Revolution kit from England, blew their cultural brains out with it, became the first industrialized Asian nation, tried to take over their side of the world, got nuked by the United States for their trouble, and discovered Steve McQueen! Their take on iconic menswear emerges from that matrix.”

“Not only did Mao Zedong Thought lead us to victory in the revolution in the past; it is - and will continue to be - a treasured possession of the Chinese Communist Party and of our country. That is why we will forever keep Chairman Mao's portrait on Tiananmen Gate as a symbol of our country, and we will always remember him as a founder of our Party and state. Moreover, we will adhere to Mao Zedong Thought. We will not do to Chairman Mao what Khrushchev did to Stalin.”

“Fashion is not just about trends. It's about political history. You can trace it from the ancient Romans to probably until the '80s, and you can see defining moments that were due either to revolutions or changes in politics. At the end of the Roman era, there was this whole move against togas, because that was the signifier of the Roman Empire. In the same way, the '60s were a reaction against the '50s and so on. But now we've been feeding on a sort of cadaver. At the moment, we're just endlessly recycling the past.”

“[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.”

“Who so desireth to know what will be hereafter, let him think of what is past, for the world hath ever been in a circular revolution; whatsoever is now, was heretofore; and things past or present, are no other than such as shall be again: Redit orbis in orbem.”