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Revolution Quotes

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Revolution Quotes

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change, be it COP 15, 21, 40 - you choose the number. It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.”

“No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.”

“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.”

“We need the conflagration of Love to change the world, we need the fire of love to illuminate the society. The cold, insipid and complicated codes don't change anything, don't transform anything. All the best social projects and the best political principles are useless if they are not written with the fire of Love. The real revolution is the result of transformation, only the storms of Love can transform the individual and the society.”

“Change is more often a rapid transition between two stable states than a continuous transformation at slow and steady rates. . . .Change occurs in large leaps following a slow accumulation of stress that a system resists until it reaches the breaking point. Heat water, and it eventually boils. Oppress the workers more and more and bring on the revolution.”

“The transformations of the French empire itself or of French power structures themselves as well as the emergence of a kind of language of equal rights starting with the American Revolution and the French Revolution provided an opportunity and in some ways connected with other kinds of ground level desires or hopes and ideologies for freedom that were coming out of the plantation regime itself.”

“The revolution of ideas that will save us is a revolution of goodwill, of compassion, and of higher thinking. I believe that they outnumber the people who would choose fear. But they are not a particularly politicized force. If you look at the numbers of people buying books about revolutions from within and personal transformation as the key to global change, the numbers add up to a much greater audience than most people realize.”

“Historians will look back on this era and how the Internet changed what we value, what we consider art, the way we think, the way we define what it means to be human. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling describes the changes that occurred between about 1850 and 1920, due to the Industrial Revolution and the resulting migration of people from small communities to relative anonymity in cities. Because of that paradigm shift, ideas about what it means to be an individual underwent a transformation that leeched into all areas. Art, psychology, history, marriage, gender.”

“King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.”

“Where utopianism is advanced through gradualism rather than revolution, albeit steady and persistent as in democratic societies, it can deceive and disarm an unsuspecting population, which is largely content and passive. It is sold as reforming and improving the existing society's imperfections and weaknesses without imperiling its basic nature. Under these conditions, it is mostly ignored, dismissed, or tolerated by much of the citizenry and celebrated by some. Transformation is deemed innocuous, well-intentioned, and perhaps constructive but not a dangerous trespass on fundamental liberties.”

“We have been living amidst one of the great revolutions of human history, and we hardly know it: the penetration of the State into every aspect of human life and society. Some people regard this as good and "progressive," others regard it as tyrannical; but either way, it's a fact, a transformation as great as, say, the Industrial Revolution. Absolutely nothing is now beyond the scope of State power.”