c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
No, there's a group of hardened, fossilised men opposed by fresh young revolutionaries as John Butte once was, forming between them a whole, a balance. And then a group of fossilised hardened men like John Butte, opposed by a group of fresh and lively-minded and critical people. But the core of deadness, of dry thought, could not exist without lively shoots of fresh life, to be turned so fast, in their turn, into dead sapless wood. In other words, I, 'Comrade Anna'- and the ironical tone of Comrade Butte's voice now frightens me when I remember it-keep Comrade Butte in existence, feed him, and in due course will become him. And as I think this, that there is no right, no wrong, simply a process, a wheel turning, I become frightened, because everything in me cries out against such a view of life, and I am back inside a nightmare which it seems I've been locked in for years, whenever I'm off guard. The nightmare takes various forms, comes in sleep, or in wakefulness, and can be pictured most simply like this: There is a blindfolded man standing with his back to a brick wall. He has been tortured nearly to death. Opposite him are six men with their rifles raised ready to shoot, commanded by a seventh, who has his hand raised. When he drops his hand, the shots will ring out, and the prisoner will fall dead. But suddenly there is something unexpected-yet not altogether unexpected, for the seventh has been listening all this while in case it happens. There is an outburst of shouting and fighting in the street outside. The six men look in query at their officer, the seventh. The officer stands waiting to see how the fighting outside will resolve itself. There is a shout: 'We have won!' At which the officer crosses the space to the wall, unties the bound man, and stands in his place. The man, hitherto bound, now binds the other. There is a moment, and this is the moment of horror in the nightmare, when they smile at each other: it is a brief, bitter, accepting smile. They are brothers in that smile. The smile holds a terrible truth that I want to evade. Because it cancels all creative emotion. The officer, the seventh, now stands blindfolded and waiting with his back to the wall. The former prisoner walks to the firing squad who are still standing with their weapons ready. He lifts his hand, then drops it. The shots ring out, and the body by the wall falls twitching. The six soldiers are shaken and sick; now they will go and drink to drown the memory of their murder. But the man who was bound, is now free, smiles as they stumble away, cursing and hating him, just as they would have cursed and hated the other, now dead. And in this man's smile at the six innocent soldiers there is a terrible understanding irony. This is the nightmare.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
We demand justice," Jeff says. "we don't have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice.""And conditions are ripe, is that what you're saying?""Very ripe. People are pissed off. They're scared for their kids. That's the moment things can tip. If it works like Chenoweth's law says it does, then you only need about fifteen percent of a population to engage in civil disobedience, and the rest see it and support it, and the oligarchy falls. You get a new legal regime. It doesn't have to get all bloody and lead to a thugocracy of violent revolutionaries. If can work. And conditions are ripe.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140
The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.
— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate." (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) "And it looks to me as if it is going to go on, because the French aren't going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren't, because they can't. They're fighting with their backs the the wall.""I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war," he lied."That's the least of my worries. When that comes, we've had it. You can't sit around mooning about Judgement Day. That's just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing's changed at all.
— Paul Bowles, The Spider's House
The last thing I want to tell you is this: in a real revolution—not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions—in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment—often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. But enough of that. My meaning is that I don’t want you to be a victim.
— Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
But after reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
— George Orwell, 1984
A true revolution is about making those who are comfortable with corruption, uncomfortable. It's about pointing your fingers in the right direction and with nothing but the truth, will comes power. A power not to exploit the Liberian people. But an ability to restore liberty, justice, and prosperity for all.
— Henry Johnson Jr, Liberian Son
Its spiritual revolution time; warrior up and let's get some for the Kingdom and slay them giants of sin and shame, marching upward for God is with us! Push Through church, push through!
— John M. Sheehan
If God needs to condemn anything to hell, it ought to be the idea of social death. Every day we commit an act of revolution, an act of treason, against a system that was never meant to guarantee our survival.
— Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
The Industrial Revolution appears to be in its final stages and it will be remembered as a time where industrial stock markets were at historic highs at the same time that many natural processes were shutting down, including the next generation of humans.
— Steven Magee
The hour that was for them, for us, for all who had awakened one morning to see their fields covered with blood rather than harvest, who didn't seek to change the world but lived in good faith and prayer offered to an imposing God, for the young women who mended their men's clothing and held their sons' mouths to the purple nipples of sweet breasts, for the man who watched the suns descend behind the mountain every evening and dreamed and when his sons were grown, passed on his dreams, for the black nights when guitars harmonized with the wind's song, to the bottle of regional brew, and a hand-rolled cigarette, to the baptism and a dance of celebration, to the aroma of soups simmering on wood-burning stoves and filled the bellies of those who worked the fields, to a candle that burned in vigil while a hungry mind gulped the printed truth of another's legacy, to the owl that called from between the moon and earth while lovers enwrapped their passion on silver tinted grass, to the history of the world and to its future, to all that had lived and died and had been born again in that moment as i approached am opaque window and pointed my weapon.
— Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters
...I learned the lesson that, even after the revolution, cool, handsome and confident is always going to beat weird-looking and needy.
— Alexei Sayle, Stalin Ate My Homework
From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
— George Orwell, 1984
It is very difficult to motivate people to revolution when they are extremely comfortable and well off.
— Neal Asher, Brass Man
It is wrong to judge revolutions by whether they succeed or fail. Virtually all revolutions fail. Either they fail literally and are reversed by forces of reaction or they fail metaphorically by compromising their lofty goals. The fairest way to assess the impact of a revolution is by the fact that it happens at all.
— Michael Goldfarb, Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance
Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence?
— Paolo Freire
I think that after a revolution a man needs a few years to get used to the new era. I knew from my limited and worthless experience that those who tear down and destroy one era cannot build another. Just as weapons can't suddenly become flowers, a killer can't suddenly turn gardener. Hasan-i Tofan, an earlier killer and member of "The Finishing-Off Sports Club
— Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
— Friedrich Engels
The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not.
— Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
Are you like, a crazy person?I’m quite sure they will say so.
— Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
A Revolution is always A Step in the Forward Direction benefiting the majority.
— Ashok Khurana
I think that after a revolution a man needs a few years to get used to the new era. I knew from my limited and worthless experience that those who tear down and destroy one era cannot build another. Just as weapons can't suddenly become flowers, a killer can't suddenly turn gardener.Hasan-i Tofan, an earlier killer and member of "The Finishing-Off Sports Club
— Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City
I think that after a revolution a man needs a few years to get used to the new era. I knew from my limited and worthless experience that those who tear down and destroy one era cannot build another. Just as weapons can't suddenly become flowers, a killer can't suddenly turn gardener. Hasan-i Tofan, a killer and an earlier member of "The Finishing-Off Sports Club
— Bakhtiyar Ali, I Stared at the Night of the City
I'd internalized an astonishing amount of misogyny growing up that I didn't even recognize until my early twenties.
— Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade
It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists
—  every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties
The reality of our connection is a new story for the whole of civilization, and operating from the wisdom of relatedness is a radical act. It is the stuff of peaceful revolution and lasting transformation.
— Heather Lyn Mann, Ocean of Insight: A Sailor's Voyage from Despair to Hope
O fire, O soulGive us the spark of God-eternal,That friend to friend and friend to foe,One shall we stand before HIM.And the flame of Jatin,And the fire of Bhagath,And the love of the Mahatma in all,O, lift the flag high,Lift the flag high,This is the flag of the Revolution.
— Raja Rao, Kanthapura: Indian Novel
And the police got nervous and they began to kick us in our backs and stomachs, and the crowd shouted 'Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!' and someone took a kerosene tin and began to beat it, and someone took a cattle-bell and began to ring it, and they cried, 'With them, brothers, with them!' and they leaped and they ducked and they came down to lie beside us, and we shouted 'Mahatma Gandhi ki jai! Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!
— Raja Rao, Kanthapura: Indian Novel
Unless you can guide the mind inward, and take the attention beyond the comprehension of mind, and directly experience life, you never reach to the ultimate truth of life.
— Roshan Sharma
People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but expect dinner to turn up within the hour.
— Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.
— Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics
Don't listen to anyone but me
— Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
Revolutionaries do not only have different ideas (or even actions) from pseudo-revolutionaries. What they are is different, and the way they act is. They do not try to enrol people in order to represent them and be a power in their name ... Their action is never an attempt to organise others, only to express their own subversive response to the world.
— Gilles Dauvé, The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement
Some revolutions resemble restorations, at least at first glance.
— Luigina Sgarro
If we make a union in these fields, is there anything we can do to ensure it doesn't become corrupt? Or that later it doesn't only look after the people who work here, we just look after our own, and everyone else can fend for themselves? We need to fight for ourselves, here and now, but we also need changes so large and impossible they encompass the entire world.
— Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor
Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upward for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.
— Émile Zola, Germinal
The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever.
— Max Horkheimer
Revolution doesn't always mean violent, it has a reverse meaning on it; noituLOVEr
— Cj Lacuesta
Everything was burning. Today it was the bodies
—  tomorrow it would be the spirit.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
— Karl Marx
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like... [It] often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that the novelty shall not be suppressed for very long... [N]ormal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
I think I'll accept the challenge to battle. I can choose the terms, right? And I don't have the faintest idea how to 'prevent' a revolution. Besides, as far as I know, revolutions can get out of hand. Remember the German revolution, with the guillotine?"Derna smirked. "German revolution? Guillotine? The guillotine was used in the French revolution. Nice try, little brother.""I'm actually impressed he knew what a guillotine was," commented Armen, deadpan.I glared at the two of them. Typical big sisters. They'd just ruined my chance to show off my knowledge.
— Kaivallya Dasu, Enchantress of Elektra
To recreate a new aristocracy is the eternal task of every revolutionary project.
— Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight
An objection was made that judging what had already been done to me, if we proceeded some of us would most certainly be killed. And several others, each in their own language, countered that the way we were living here, the way we were treated, we might as well be dead already, that things couldn't get worse. Things can always get worse, someone yelled from the back, when you reach hell there is always another hell underneath.
— Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor
An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail . We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on Earth to rule all of humanity.
— Thomas Sankara
Your worst enemy is not the person in opposition to you. It is the person occupying the spot you would be fighting from and doing nothing.
— Heather  Marsh, Binding Chaos
Between reaction and revolution there is nothing to choose. Neither leave the track, they just allow different people to drive while the same people are run over.
— Heather  Marsh, Binding Chaos
The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.
— Mikhail Bakhtin
The role of an activist is not to lead the masses with a flag draped around his or her shoulders. Activists meet a few people at a time in a coffee shop to explain in hushed tones why they should believe when no one else does. An activist’s moment is not the moment of change
—  it is the period when change seems impossible.
Which is worse? Lust for the purchasing power of money, or the kind of lust that covets power over others? Let the history of 20th Century socialist revolutions answer that question.
— A.E. Samaan
Democratic Socialism devolves into totalitarian Socialism and eventually into full on Communism as people resist statism.
— A.E. Samaan
The abundance of beards in periods of social unrest, times of revolt or upheaval, should be noted. It's the handiest way people have of making themselves mysterious.
— Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years
As I witness and participate in our visionary efforts to revitalize Detroit and contrast them with the multibillion dollars' worth of megaprojects advanced by politicians and developed that involve casinos, giant stadiums, gentrification, and the Super Bowl, I am saddened by their shortsightedness. At the same time I rejoice in the energy being unleashed in the community by our human-scale programs that involve bringing the country back into the city and removing the walls between schools and communities, between generations, and between ethnic groups. And I am confident just as in the early twentieth century people came from around the world to marvel at the mass production lines pioneered by Henry Ford, in the twenty-first century they will be coming to marvel at the thriving neighborhoods that are the fruit of our visionary programs.
— Grace Lee Boggs
They call me a tyrant . . . One arrives at a tyrant's throne by the help of scoundrels . . . What faction do I belong to? You yourselves. What is that faction which, since the Revolution began, has crushed the factions and swept away hireling traitors? It is you, it is the people, it is the principles of the Revolution. 
— Maximilien de Robespierre, Robespierre
the sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting stone of ideas-bhagat singh in court during his trial, india's struggle for freedom
— Bhagat Singh
Who then shall unravel all these subtle combinations? Who shall trace the exact dividing line that marks off one form of extremism from its opposite? It can be done only by a love of country and a love of truth. Kings and knaves will always try to destroy this love, for they shun reason and truth like the p
— Maximilien de Robespierre, Robespierre
Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Revolution was never sparked by political philosophy. It has ever been the price of bread that shakes the pillars of the world. Yet they lock up the thinkers and leave the bakers free.
— Rod Duncan, Unseemly Science
We preach revolution but whine about the oppression in the name of change
— Goitsemang Mvula
A revolution does not have to eat its children. In fact, it is those who are in power who could very well initiate revolutions. Let us not be old-fashioned and think only of armed uprisings of minorities as revolutions. Any movement that seeks to overhaul established attitudes is a revolution.
— F. Sionil José
We preach revolution but whine about the oppression in the name of change.
— Goitsemang Mvula
The scars are just something that happened to me. They aren't me. Not anymore.
— Amy Engel, The Revolution of Ivy
Make criticism in good time
—  don't get into the habit of criticizing only after the event.
Not all speed is movement.
— Toni Cade Bambara
When you are trying to do something very innovative and revolutionary, you must also open yourself to a lot of questions.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
As if the sky itself were listening, the dome overhead darkened, and three enormous screens lit up against the black backdrop."People of Luna," said a feminine voice, "please give your full attention now to this mandatory broadcast, live from Artemisia Palace. The royal coronation ceremony is about to begin." A wicked grin pulled at Winter's lips. She stepped away from Jacin, faced the people, and raised her arms to her sides. "People of Luna," she said, echoing the broadcast and pulling the crowd's attention away from the dome, "please give your full attention now to the true heir to the Lunar throne, Princess Selene, live from your very own sector." Her eyes flashed as she swooped and arm toward Cinder. "Our revolution is about to begin.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution and good brew. The taste of one immediately brought to mind the other.
— Guy de Maupassant, A Parisian Affair and Other Stories
I am not going to leave this land, I will die as a martyr at the end … I shall remain, defiant. Muammar is leader of the revolution until the end of time.
— Muammar Gaddafi
Even in my own time and in my own life, I have witnessed a revolution.
— Sandra Day O'Connor
But to what end? Some... future revolution? It can never succeed.As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
The more we gained knowledge of these new totalitarian systems of mass-rule, the more we realized not only their similarity of structure, but also the fact that we had to do with a type of dominance that had been known in earlier epochs. We discovered that what the ancients called “tyrannis,” or 'cheirokratia,” what Sulla or the tyrants of the Italian Rennaissance had practised, and what finally alarmed the world in the French Revolution and under Napoleon, had surprisingly many similarities with modern totalitarianism, although this latter had elements with which they cannot be compared, and although it possessed means of domination unknown in past ages.
— Wilhelm Röpke, The German Question
And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
The greatest fear of those who rule is not the opposition but not to be taken seriously.
— Gündüz Vassaf, Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life
HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense.
— Garth Risk Hallberg
Wanting to change only the British position at the top of the American social structure, John Adams feared that a "rage for innovation" would consume what was worthwhile about American culture.
— John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic
There I find an Ark torn asunder and a Vicegerent over Yonder
— saqib abraham
When we say "transformation," it means that nothing of the old has remained. Something totally new has flowered within you. Now you look at a rose plant that is full of thorns. Springtime came and rose flowers burst out — it is a transformation. The thorns are still there — there are more thorns than flowers — but we do not call it a thorn plant. We call it a rose plant because of that single rose. Everyone's attention goes more towards that single rose than a hundred thorns that are on the plant, isn't it? So all the thorns in you, maybe you cannot remove them right now, but if one rose flower blossoms, everyone is willing to overlook those things.
— Sadhguru, Life and Death in One Breath
During self-reflection, the realization came that revolution begins within.
— Amanda Mosher, Better to be able to love than to be loveable
There is simply no issue more important. Conservation is the preservation of human life on earth, and that, above all else, is worth fighting for.
— Rob Stewart, Sharkwater: The Photographs
This is the thing you need to spread the word about among our people wherever you go. Never let them be brainwashed into thinking that whenever they take steps to see that they're in a position to defend themselves that they
— re being unlawful. The only time you're being unlawful is when you break the law. It's LAWFUL to have something to DEFEND yourself.
The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity
The Arab Spring whose seeds failed to bloom anything other than a chaotic mess that requires only blood to grow has contributed immensely to the rising numbers of these migrants.
— Aysha Taryam
His headstone saidFREE AT LAST, FREE AT LASTBut death is a slave's freedomWe seek the freedom of free menAnd the construction of a world Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached non-violence
— Nikki Giovanni
They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others
The romanticism of struggle is over. What remains are the utterly naked facts. The cult of personality and its collapse. Rethinking of everything. The masks are off (the mask of religion, the mask of heroism…).
— Sonallah Ibrahim
Don't whine about your poverty and brainless labor. You can read, can't you? Get thee to a library and foment rebellion - in both inner and outer worlds.
— Bill Holm, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
— Terry Pratchett
...the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is building its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.
— Richard Wright
To change the world by bullets or ballots was a useless procedure. If the workers ever did get a majority of either, they would have the envy and greed in their hearts and would be chained by these as much as by the chains of the master class. And the State which they would like to call a Cooperative Commonwealth would be based on power; the state would not wither away but would grow. Therefore the only revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.
— Ammon Hennacy
...if the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror. Virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompts, severe, inflexible. It is there an emanation of virtue. It is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs...is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?... Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without?...
— Maximillian Robespierre
Mapidéré was but one man-and indeed, judging by rumors of his decrepit state near death, a weak, sickly man-but his creation, the empire, had taken on a life of its own. Killing the emperor would not have been enough. We have to kill the empire.
— Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings
It doesn't matter if most people refuse to understand nor support my efforts, not at all, it doesn't at all matter. What matters is, I am pioneering a revolution.
— Sunday Adelaja
O.K., so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions.
— Haruki Murakami
Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world. There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child. However—I could not have said any of this then, nor is so absurd a notion about to engulf the world now. But we were all starving children, after all, and none of our fathers, even at their most embittered and enraged, had ever suggested that we ‘die out.’ It was not we who were supposed to die out: this was, of all notions, the most forbidden, and we learned this from the cradle. Every trial, every beating, every drop of blood, every tear, were meant to be used by us for a day that was coming—for a day that was certainly coming, absolutely certainly, certainly coming: not for us, perhaps, but for our children. The children of the despised and rejected are menaced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are therefore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not. And the children know it, which is how they manage to raise their children, and why they will not be persuaded—by their children’s murderers, after all—to cease having children.
— James     Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation.Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel.Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world.It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation.
— Peter Joseph
[O]ur revolt was as much against the traditional black leadership structure as it was against segregation and discrimination.
— John Lewis, March: Book One
I am becoming in coming undone. I unbind. I rise like the morning: revolution.
— Sarah Gerard, Binary Star
Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here 'I lost my land' is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--'We lost *our* land.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
If no one seems to understandStart your own revolution and cut out the mid
— Billy Bragg, A Lover Sings: Selected Lyrics
You ball up your fist each time you hear about an unfound injustice in the world. That makes me your brother.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
It seemed that there was no time to catch up with all the things that were happening. I would be at the construction workers' demonstration one day and then marching with the welfare mothers the next. We got down with everything - the rent strikes, the sit-ins, the takeover of the Harlem state office building, whatever it was. If we agreed with it, we would try to give active support in some way. The more active i became, the more i liked it. It was like medicine, making me well, making me whole ...My energy just couldn't stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of the struggle and i wanted to dance. I was never bored and never lonely, and the brothers and sisters who became my friends were so beautiful to me.
— Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way, if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once & for all; it is defined all along the road which leads up to it.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Most of us felt that taking control of our neighborhoods was the first step toward liberation...First, we would take control of the schools; then we would take control of the hospitals; then we would take control of the colleges, the housing, etc., etc. We would have community controlled employment, welfare centers, and city, state, and federal agencies.'Hold on for a minute,' somebody said. 'Where are y'all gonna get the money to run all that stuff?''We'll take community control of the banks,' someone answered.'You'd better take community control of the army, too, because those banks aren't gonna just let you take their money lying down."'We'll take control of the political institutions in our community. Then we'll take control of the congressional seats, the senate seats, the city council seats, the mayor's office, and every other office you can take control of. We'll take control of the political offices so we can allocate money to the people who need it.''Y'all just wishing and hoping,' someone said. 'You can control the social institutions and the political institutions, but unless you control the economic and military institutions, you can only go so far.
— Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
When I want to find the vanguard of the people I look to the uneasy dreams of an aristocracy and find what they dread most.
— Wendell Phillips
They sit there shouting "Don't do it." Someone told them revolution looked like the Cosby Show. A slight tug with a good lesson. Revolution is a tough struggle between what was and what needs to be.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
One did not love revolution. One embraced it with horror for the sake of the deliverance to follow.
— Gabrielle Warnock, The Silkweaver
When leaders betray their people and the people don't overthrow them, it's not just the leaders who should be blamed.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, Новый Дозор
As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice – there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.
— Thomas S. Kuhn
Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form -- this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that's not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we're all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.
— David Graeber, Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination
At the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of revolution, was Combeferre, representing its philosophy. The difference between logic and philosophy is that one can decide upon war, whereas the other can only be fulfilled by peace.
— Victor Hugo
We don't need unity in theory, we need solidarity in practice.
— Curious George Brigade, Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs
Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?
— Rebecca Solnit
Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research.
— China Miéville, The City & the City
There is no country on earth which does need no revolution!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there's something they can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anticapitalist revolution without gun-battles in the streets -- which most of us are hoping it is, since let's face it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose -- there's no possible way we could have an anticapitalist revolution while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights. Yes, that will probably mean the suburban middle class will be the last to come on board. But they would probably be the last to come on board anyway.
— David Graeber, Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination
The voices of actual communities are alive in a way no theory could every be even if, for now, it takes the form of tiny acts of resistance. Who doesn't cheat on taxes, avoid cops, or skip class? These acts themselves may not be revolutionary, but they begin to unravel the control from above. Anarchist approaches must be relevant to everyday experiences and flexible enough to address struggles in different situations and contexts. If we can achieve this, then we may thrive in the world after the dinosaurs. We might even be fortunate enough to be in one of the communities that have a hand in toppling them.
— Curious George Brigade
Revolution is the accession of the peoples, and, at the bottom, the People is Man.
— Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three
When there is a grand cause to be won, he said, sometimes, there are unavoidable casualties. None of us are happy about that, but it’s a painful reality. He paused and added, We’ve all accepted our culpability…
— Leslie Ann Moore, A Tangle of Fates
A revolution was inevitably coming; the earth was destined to be reclaimed, renewed and revived.
— Shizette Parker, Candles of Rejuvenescence
Oh, dead man, you're dead wrong, I tell him. The world goes on stupid and brutal, but I do not. Can't you see? I do not.
— Jennifer Donelly
Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.
— Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come
They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master—I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov—my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood.
— Maxim Gorky, Mother
The Algerians were revolutionsists, they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France, to hell with Fance, they wanted some land, not some France.
— Malcolm X
In fact they were looking for weapons eager to find something they could justify the millions of dollars and massive deployment of personnel, the collection of stun-guns, tear-gas guns, pepper-spray guns, M16’s, horses, clubs, and armored personnel carriers with which they intended to protect the city from our hordes of puppet carriers and potentially illegal gardeners
— Starhawk
Those——"—here he flung out a terrible oath—"those people don't know what their blind hands are sowing. They will know when our power is complete and we begin to mow down their cursed grass. They'll know it then!
— Maxim Gorky, Mother
We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla is a social reformer, who takes up arms responding to the angry protests of the people against their oppressors, and who fights to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and poverty.
— Ernesto Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics & Revolution
This is the way it ought to be!" said the Little Russian, returning. "Because, mark you, mother dear, a new heart is coming into existence, a new heart is growing up in life. All hearts are smitten in the conflict of interests, all are consumed with a blind greed, eaten up with envy, stricken, wounded, and dripping with filth, falsehood, and cowardice. All people are sick; they are afraid to live; they wander about as in a mist. Everyone feels only his own toothache. But lo, and behold! Here is a Man coming and illuminating life with the light of reason, and he shouts: 'Oh, ho! you straying roaches! It's time, high time, for you to understand that all your interests are one, that everyone has the need to live, everyone has the desire to grow!' The Man who shouts this is alone, and therefore he cries aloud; he needs comrades, he feels dreary in his loneliness, dreary and cold. And at his call the stanch hearts unite into one great, strong heart, deep and sensitive as a silver bell not yet cast. And hark! This bell rings forth the message: 'Men of all countries, unite into one family! Love is the mother of life, not hate!' My brothers! I hear this message sounding through the world!
— Maxim Gorky, Mother