c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Labourism was to be the bete noire of the Party, hated as much as the capitalist system itself. Its growth was to lead to the hardening of Party attitudes almost to the point where even the wish to improve everyday conditions was considered iniquitous. The resentment was heated by the fact that many of the rising Labour leaders had been fellow members of the Social Democratic Federation and once professed the revolution.No words were strong enough for the Party's contempt. In the the Socialist Standard they were 'fakirs', a strong allusion to self-seeking piety, and on the platforms 'Labour bleeders',...
— Robert Barltrop
Then the lion stares at it. It stares at its prey. Like this.' (Old Antonio frowns and fastens his black eyes on me.) 'The poor little animal that is going to die just looks. It looks at the lion, who is staring at him. The little animal no longer sees itself, it sees what the lion sees, it looks at the little animal image in the lion's stare, it sees that the lion sees it as small and weak. The little animal never thought before about whether it was small and weak. It was just an animal, neither big nor small, neither strong nor weak. But now it looks at what the lion is seeing, it looks at fear. And by looking at what the lion is seeing, the little animal convinces itself that it is small and weak. And, by looking at the fear that the lion sees, it feels afraid. And now the little animal does not look at anything. Its bones go numb, just like when water gets hold of us at night in the cold. And then the little animal just surrenders, it lets itself go and the lion gets it. That is how the lion kills. It kills by staring.
— Subcomandante Marcos
In the end the British will walk out because 100,000 British cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.” A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannized, or anesthetized into compliance. Gandhi dealt with the colonization of nations by nations; we deal now with the colonization of consciousness by corporations.
— Russell Brand, Revolution
Am I seeing or am i dreamingIts showing so I'm believingAm i seeing what i believe orAm i being shown then believing
— Mohammad K. Walizada
You know there’s always prejudice in a revolutionary movement.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Revolutions arise from obstinacy. People are dissatisfied with what they are told and they develop new ideas.
— Dirk Kurbjuweit
Individuals start to see themselves reflected in their work and to understand their full status as human beings through the object created, through the work accomplished. Work no longer entails surrendering a part of one's being in the form of labor power sold, which no longer belongs to the individual, but becomes an expression of oneself, a contribution to the common life in which one is reflected, the fulfillment of one's social duty.
— Ernesto Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics & Revolution
Rituals are missing nowadays
— Russell Brand, Revolution
I believe that a revolution can begin from this one strand of straw. Seen at a glance, this rice straw may appear light and insignificant. Hardly anyone would believe that it could start a revolution. Nevertheless, I have come to realize the weight and power of this straw.
— Fukuoka , Masanobu
One day it's the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it's everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one's been taking out the trash.
— Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
And, when the revolutionary cries that he is fighting for ‘freedom’, be sure to go running away from him just as fast as you can, for you can be damned certain he’s fighting for the freedom to tell you what to do.
— Neal Asher, The Departure
God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.
— Alexander Pushkin, The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories
In the future no one will kill anyone, the earth will shine, the human race will love. It will come, citizens, the day when all will be peace, harmony, light, joy, and life, it will come. And it is so that it comes that we are going to die.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Revolution starts in the mind. Question Everything!
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Freedom without the means to be self-supporting is a one-armed triumph.
— Michelle Cliff
Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues.
— Lionel Trilling
We fought an entire army with a bouquet of flowers back in the '70'sBut now you're taught to remain without will until you run out of energyAfraid that if you strive for an ideal you end up like a KennedyIt's like being on a treadmill every day but never losing any weight'Cause to see success the food before you digest has to changeWe're stressed and high, get depressed and dieBut still afraid to question whyOne of the biggest criminals I ever met wore a suit and tieWhen did we stop believing? When did we stop marching?When did we stop chanting?
— Kasabian
The revolution of today is the oppression of tomorrow.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Revolution is simple. It's like a breath; out with the old, and in with the new.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Ritual may be vital to reaction, but it is also the life blood of revolution.
— David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.... I advice keep singing peacefully "GO NAWAZ GO
— Abdul'Rauf Hashmi
The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
The revolution is now just a sentiment.
— Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems
A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.
— Max Horkheimer
But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on, "is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout to them: “You are tearing up the pavements of hell!” They might reply: “That is because our barricade is made of good intentions.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
It's just so impressive to see how the women have used making Fair Trade clothes to escape poverty and empower themselves and their children. - Emma Watson
— Safia Minney, Naked Fashion: The New Sustainable Fashion Revolution
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.
— George Orwell, 1984
Of course, chaos can lead to failure and extinction. But so can order. Far more nations, people, and ideas die of atrophy than die from revolution. Both order and chaos are necessary ingredients for long run success - for sustainability.
— John Ikerd, Small Farms Are Real Farms
The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.
— Yukio Mishima
The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
A commune of library employees in Moscow created an "extreme" commune in which all clothing - including undergarments - was collectivized. According to Mehnert, if a communard preferred to wear his or her own underclothes "it would be characterized as a backslide into darkest capitalism; as prejudice originating in a petit-bourgeois ideology".
— Richard Stites
I wonder Why we make huge revolutions and then the result is zero of hopes,freedom or even to find the food !
— عبير المعداوي
The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.
— Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
I tell you," said Augustine, "if there is anything that revealed with the strength of a divine law in our times, it is that the masses are to rise, and the under class becomes the upper one.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
The field of financial innovation, without rules that tie it to human productive output will be the cause of the next revolution.
— Said Elias Dawlabani, MEMEnomics: The Next-Generation Economic System
Peace, he'd said. And revolution. How could there be both?
— Stephanie Landsem, The Thief
Again, Syd had that feeling, the past as an echo, repeating itself as it faded. The poor had longed for Jubilee to save them from the powerful, and now the one-time patrons longed for the Machine to do the same. Every revolution believes it can return something that had been lost, but nothing is ever the same. The only thing that endures are people. Syd saw that clearly now, and perhaps so too did Marie. You could serve a revolution, an idea that ended up an echo if itself, or you could serve people, with their maddening contradictions. You couldn't serve both. You had to choose.
— Alex London, Guardian
The lives of thousands of young Frenchmen were ready for this literary bath of blood and sentiment in the 1830's. Their fathers and grandfathers had had their romanticism in the raw: the drama of the French Revolution, the glamour of the Napoleonic campaigns in Europe and in Africa had filled their lives with colour; now the young people, listening with envy to reminiscence and tradition, knew they were living in a world that had become flat and dull. For the unshackling of the Revolution and the pageantry and devotion of the Empire had been succeeded by two colourless Bourbon kings, who had learned nothing from the times and were so stupid as to insist on absolutism without providing any splendour to justify it; and when their line was expelled in a minor revolution in 1830 they were replaced by their even more colourless cousin, Louis Philippe of Orleans, a constitutional monarch whose virtue was that he was more bourgeois than the bourgeois and whom the newspapers caricatured unendingly, strolling with his family past the shops he owned, carrying an umbrella under his arm. In placing him on the throne the French bourgeoisie consolidated the gains it had begun to make forty years before, and his prime minister gave the watchword of the day when he urged his fellow-citizens to make as much money as they possibly could. The French bourgeois — the revolutionaries of 1789, the conquerors of Europe under Napoleon — became rich, smug, tenacious, and fearful of change; and their children and grandchildren, the young men of Flaubert's generation, were raised in an atmosphere of careful, commercial materialism, of complete lack of interest in literature and the arts, and of complete distrust of impulse and imagination.
— Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary
He was Antinous, wild. You would have said, seeing the thoughtful reflection of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, been through the revolutionary apocalypse. He knew its tradition like an eyewitness. He knew every little detail of that great thing.A pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution
—  one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess defenses against all possible attacks within the rules of the game, yet willing to violate those rules themselves. ... We both know that although it is not listed in the rules, a player can end the game by kicking over the board and throttling his opponent.
— Roger Zelazny, The Dead Man's Brother
The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.
— Douglas C. Engelbart
The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.
— Frank Watson Dyson
If you think like others, how can you be sure you're thinking at all?
— Daniel Delgado F
The Revolution won't be televised. It's already available on Amazon in ebook format.
— Kenya Wright
This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.
— Sara Sheridan
The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.
— Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled
An ant can't make a revolution, but a monkey can do; because it owns a fist! No real revolution is ever possible without fist.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In a struggle against a revolutionary idea it is only possible to use ideological elements which are a thousand times more radical, or adopt principles which represent a total reaction against them.
— Francis Stuart Campbell, The Menace Of The Herd: Or, Procrustes At Large
We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.
— Sara Sheridan
They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Violent overthrow of the revolution is revolutionary, and compromise with the revolution is revolutionary.
— Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth
Democracy is a system were ignorants choose a government, comunism is a system where ignorants govern themselves.
— Daniel Delgado F
But one doesn't wait for a revolution. One becomes it.
— Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
The crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be be very numerous or highly trained.
— Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression.
— James Connolly, Songs of Freedom: The James Connolly Songbook
A blind pursuit of cheap popularity has nothing to do with revolu
— Nelson Mandela
I think the notion of dreaming in a time where we are told that it is foolish, futile or not useful is one of the most revolutionary things we can do. To have our lives determined by our dreams of a free world--instead of reactions to a state-imposed reality--is one of the most powerful tools of decolonization.
— Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism
The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.
— Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution
The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip in to it; as for the red bloody meat, the steaming innards - they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution - and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked it's gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life-- as if life could be put off for a time-- what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions-- his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it-- the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Another said , "I don't ask six months, I don't ask two. In less than two weeks we'll meet the government face to face. With twenty-five thousand men we can make our stand.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
For the information of these “friends” who consider themselves called to defend against us the role of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, we give warning that our book teaches not how to love a victorious revolution after the event, in the person of the bureaucracy it has brought forward, but only how a revolution is prepared,how it develops, and how it conquers. A party is not for us a machine whosesinlessness is to be defended by state measures of repression, but a complicated organism that like all living things develops in contradictions.
— Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution
Hauriou, became a crown witness for us when he confirmed this connection in 1916, in the midst of WWI: “The revolution of 1789 had no other goal than absolute access to the writing of legal statutes and the systematic destruction of customary institutions. It resulted in a state of permanent revolution because the mobility of the writing of laws did not provide for the stability of certain customary institutions, because the forces of change were stronger than the forces of stability. Social and political life in France was completely emptied of institutions and was only able to provisionally maintain itself by sudden jolts spurred by the heightened morality.
— Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence
The essence and value of the law lies in its stability and durability (...), in its “relative eternity.” Only then does the legislator’s self-limitation and the independence of the law-bound judge find an anchor. The experiences of the French Revolution showed how an unleashed pouvoir législatif could generate a legislative orgy.
— Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence
But here's how it works: when the world has told you once too often and once and for all that you are nothing nothing nothing then you come to the conclusion that others may be nothing too.
— J.W. Horton, Angels of the Revolution
And where there are shadows, there is light, Liebchen.
— J.W. Horton, Angels of the Revolution
But let us be sure of something. We are not sheep. This government is ours, and it is meant to serve our best interests. And if it has grown into something it shouldn't be, and shucked off the rules of the Constitution it was based on, then it is our responsibility to rein it back in.
— Gary   Hansen, The Second Revolution
In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
All this ferment was public, we might almost say tranquil.The imminent insurrection gathered its storm calmly in the face of the government. No singularity was lacking in this crisis, still subterranean, but already perceptible. The middle class talked quietly with workingmen about the preparations. They would say, "How is the uprising coming along?" in the same tone in which they would have said, " How's your wife?
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
At five in the morning, some policemen, unannounced, entered the house of a man named Pardon, later a member of the section of the Barricade-Merry, and still later killed in the insurrection of April 1834, found him standing not far from his bed, with cartridges in his hands, caught in the act.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov “fortify” it.[…] This superintendent’s approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment.
— Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution
The principles of liberalism can have a real existence only in conjunction with a police system. Anarchism is an attempt to cleanse liberalism of the police. But just as pure oxygen is impossible to breathe, so liberalism without the police principle means the death of society. Being a shadow-caricature of liberalism, anarchism as a whole has shared its fate. Having killed liberalism, the development of class contradictions has also killed anarchism. Like every sect which founds its teaching not upon the actual development of human society, but upon the reduction to absurdity of one of its features, anarchism explodes like a soap bubble at that moment when the social contradictions arrive at the point of war or revolution.
— Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution
Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health -- his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order -- a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
She had shown him by her independence how it was only fear that held people together. The fear of being alone and the fear of being different.
— Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
— Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Akasha, for two thousand years I have watched,' he said. 'Call me the Roman in the Arena if you will and tell me tales of the ages that went before. When I knelt at your feet I begged you for your knowledge. But what I have witnessed in this short span has filled me with awe and love for all things mortal; I have seen revolutions in thought and philosophy which I believed impossible. Is not the human race moving towards the very age of peace you describe?'  Her face was a picture of disdain. 'Marius,' she said, 'this will go down as one of the bloodiest centuries in the history of the human race. What revolutions do you speak of, when millions have been exterminated by one small European nation on the whim of a madman, when entire cities were melted into oblivion by bombs? When children in desert countries of the East war on other children in the name of an ancient and despotic God? Marius, women the world over wash the fruits of their wombs down public drains. The screams of the hungry are deafening, yet unheard by the rich who cavort in technological citadels; disease runs rampant among the starving of whole continents while the sick in palatial hospitals spend the wealth of the world on cosmetics refinements and the promise of eternal life through pills and vials." She laughed softly. 'Did ever the cries of the dying ring so thickly in the ears of those of us who can hear them? Has ever more blood been shed?
— Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.
— Baruch Spinoza
If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak, as she had protected the lost brood of ducklings with her foreleg on the night of Major's speech. Instead–she did not know why–they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes. There was no thought of rebellion or disobedience in her mind. She knew that, even as things were, they were far better off than they had been in the days of Jones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the human beings. Whatever happened she would remain faithful, work hard, carry out the orders that were given to her, and accept the leadership of Napoleon. But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled. It was not for this that they had built the windmill and faced the bullets of Jones's gun. Such were her thoughts, though she lacked the words to express them.At last, feeling this to be in some way a substitute for the words she was unable to find, she began to sing Beasts of England. The other animals sitting round her took it up, and they sang it three times over–very tunefully, but slowly and mournfully, in a way they had never sung it before.
— George Orwell, Animal Farm
Stability and security are just illusions. But they are necessary illusions because without them there would be no way of going on.
— Andrew   Crofts, Secrets of the Italian Gardener
The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.
— Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground
He was a son of the revolutionary movement when he and the revolutionary movement were still pristine. It was a special time for Filipino activists—a time when a hundred flowers bloomed and a thousand thoughts contended in a movement that did not know yet the price of betrayal from within. But flowers wilt and thoughts give way to rancor with the passing of years. And so some may grieve not his passing, while others fall to the ground in tears./FOR HORACIO BOY MORALES, JR. (September 11, 1943 – February 29, 2012)
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
The concurrence of two elements is necessary for bringing about a revolution; and by revolution I do not mean the street warfare, nor the bloody conflicts of two parties—both being mere incidents dependent upon many circumstances—but the sudden overthrow of institutions which are the outgrowths of centuries past, the sudden uprising of new ideas and new conceptions, and the attempt to reform all political and economical institutions in a radical way—all at the same time. Two separate currents must converge to come to that result: a widely spread economic revolt, tending to change the economical conditions of the masses, and a political revolt, tending to modify the very essence of the political organisation—an economical change, supported by an equally important change of political institutions.
— Pyotr Kropotkin
Tolstoy to Gandhi to Martin Luther King to Me and You
— Brooke Bida
The revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Surprisingly, I came closer to really knowing myself, not because I feared death, because we were always aware of it, but rather because I was always challenging myself about what had led me there and about how strong my commitment really was.
— Aleida March, Remembering Che: My Life with Che Guevara
In the history of battles and wars, the massacres of civilians were the main reason of revolutions success.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Governments don't spy on you for your protection, they spy on you to see if you're planning a revolt.
— Lori Goodwin
A reactionary revolution is nothing but a high-speed evolution backwards!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Your fear is, that if you marry Adèle, you will love her. If you have children, you will love them more than anything else in the world, more than patriotism, more than democracy. If your children grow up, and prove traitors to the people, will you be able to demand their deaths, as the Romans did? Perhaps you will, but perhaps you will not be able to do it. You’re afraid that if you love people you may be deflected from your duty, but it’s because of another kind of love, isn’t it, that the duty is laid upon you?
— Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
You want a revolution, start murdering innocents.
— M.F. Moonzajer
I daresay something will happen, between now and ’91, to make your fortunes look up.
— Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
Big fish eats small fish
—  oceans need revolution! Big man beats little man
The amazing thing is nobody has to believe in anything all they have to do is be wiling to try.
— Brooke Bida
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
— Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.
— Paul Bowles, The Spider's House
Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it.
— Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings
There is only one real purpose of a real revolution: To move forward!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers’ revolution and a complete overhaul of society was a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial
— Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir
When a pebble is thrown into a lake, everything, down to the furthermost depths, moves with it. ... And if, afterwards, everything seems as it was, the level of the lake has none the less been raised by imperceptible, incalculable degree. The old order has been overthrown -- by a pebble.
— Théophile Thoré
While a battle still entirely political was preparing in this same place which had already seen so many revolutionary events, while the youth, the secret associations, the schools in the name of principles, and the middle class in the name of interests, were moving in to dash against each other, to grapple and overthrow each other, while each was hurrying and calling the final and decisive hour of the crisis, far off and outside that fatal sector, in the deepest of the unfathomable caverns of that miserable old Paris, the gloomy voice of the people was heard deeply growling.	A fearful, sacred voice, composed of the roaring brute and the speech of God, which terrifies the feeble and warns the wise, which comes at the same time from below like the voice of a lion and from above like the voice of thunder. Page 1123 Saint-Denis Chapter 13 part II
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
...it happens that "society is saved" as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an "assault upon society" and is branded as "Socialism.
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Real education is about revolution.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
One person really can make a difference. Each person is the revolution.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town.
— Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
Every man must be a part of a progressive revolution at least once in his lifetime! This will leave him great honour and great memories for the future.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The French Revolution, which is nothing more nor less than the ideal armed with the sword, rose abruptly, and by that very movement, closed the door of evil and opened the door of good.It released the question, promulgated truth, drove away miasma, purified the century, crowned the people.We can say it created man a second time, in giving him a second soul, his rights. Page 997 Saint-Denis chapter 7 Argot part III
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
A kind of wonder takes Chaucer over as he pants up Fleet Street and past the walled orchards and gardens of this lovely riverside suburb for princes of kingdom and Church.This isn't mob action, not really, even if there were men back there shouting that they were off to break into Newgate Jail and set the prisoners free.It's something else. Something he's never seen, or imagined.These men don't loot. They aren't trying to get rich, or even just get fed. They're not remotely interested in picking up a few unconsidered trifles from the palaces they're passing, however lovely the houses are, however manicured the gardens.They're here to destroy. And they know their targets.
— Vanora Bennett, The People's Queen
When the corruption seems to go all the way to the end of the world, the only good approach is through the front door with a gun in each hand.
— Mira Grant, Deadline
Perhaps I was hosting my own personal sexual revolution. You know the kind that will not be televised.
— Sabrina Childress, Those Necessary Thorns: Desiree Elizabeth Taylor
We all have a revolution inside us. For one thing or another!! It is a nature for us to be like this, we want things to be like God created them to be, and when it doesn't go that way, we fight for our Lord as warriors and soldiers. God is alive and we need him to change this world. Elena~
— Elena Toledo
Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.
— Kate Millett, Sexual Politics
It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.
— Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed
History respects revolutions; and yet, if a revolution is progressive, support it; if it is reactionary, resist it!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?
— John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.
— William S. Burroughs, With William Burroughs: A Report From The Bunker
No turtle can be a revolutionist, because revolution requires high speed!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Even in the middle of barking dogs, you can hear the footsteps of a big revolution!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older.
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilisation ... there has been only one—the triumph of Christianity —that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.
— David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
Revolution must take place within one's own mind.
— Lionel Suggs
[O]ne cannot separate violence from the very exist­ ence of the state (as the apparatus of class domination): from the standpoint of the'subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of a state is a fact of violence (in the same sense in which, for example, Robespierre said, in his justification of the regicide, that one does not have to prove that the king committed any specific crimes, since the very existence of the king is a crime, an offence against the freedom of the people). In this strict sense, every violence of the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is ultimately ‘defensive’. If we do not concede this point, we volens nolens ‘normalize’ the state and accept that its violence is merely a matter of contin­ gent excesses (to be dealt with through democratic reforms).
— Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution
This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals - the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
We will remember the way things used to be, and teach our children to be better than us. The generations that follow will remember with us. In that day, we will all be free
— Rachel Higginson
The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies
— Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution
His August Majesty chided the bureaucrats for failing to understand a simple principle: the principle of the second bag. Because the people never revolt just because they have to carry a heavy load, or because of exploitation. They don't know life without exploitation, they don't even know that such a life exists. How can they desire what they cannot imagine? The people will rvolt only when, in a single movement, someone tries to throw a second burden, a second heavy bag, onto their backs. The peasant will fall face down into the mud - and then spring up and grab an ax. He'll grab an ax, my gracious sir, not because he simply can't sustain this new burden - he could carry it - he will rise because he feels that, in throwing the second burden onto his back suddenly and stealthily, you have tried to cheat him, you have treated him like an unthinking animal, you have trampled what remains of his already strangled dignity, taken him for an idiot who doesn't see, feel, or understand. A man doesn't seize an ax in defense of his wallet, but in defense of his dignity, and that, dear sir, is why His Majesty scolded the clerks. For their own convenience and vanity, instead of adding the burden bit by bit, in little bags, they tried to heave a whole big sack on at once.
— Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor
There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
. . . and what are you exactly, my friend? Their subordinate? Their employee? Or, I would suggest, their equal? That's what young Karl would certainly have said, and probably still does. Unless he's no longer alive.' Dodger gave Solomon and strange look and Solomon hastened to clarify. "'Mmmm, as I recall, if you go around telling people that they are downtrodden, you tend to make two separate enemies: the people who are doing the downtreading and have no intention of stopping, and the people who are downtrodden, but nevertheless -- people being who they are -- don't want to know. They can get quite nasty about it.' (205)
— Terry Pratchett, Dodger
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Ok 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 get exploited. What kind revolution is it that just throws out big words that working class people can't understand.Revolution or not the working class will just keep on scraping a living in the same old shitholesI'm not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I'm going to believe in. -- Midori
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.
— Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties
Revolution is an awakening, so is the spring! Spring is an awakening, so is the revolution!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Washington was concerned that the soldiers coming to him from Massachusetts were too few and of too low quality. He was disappointed that the majority of the Massachusetts volunteers appeared to be thrill-seeking teenagers, British Army deserters and otherwise unemployed African Americans. Washington doubted that these volunteers would ever be able to stand up to the British. Much to Washington's surprise, the free black men soon proved to be exemplary soldiers.
— C.L. Gammon, Guns, Politics and Independence: Correspondence between General Washington and President Hancock - June 16, 1775-July 10, 1776
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. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.
— Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
Everything under heaven is in utter chaos
—  the situation is excellent.
Each of you must decide where you stand. All we ask is that you refuse to kneel. You are the people. You have the power. Open your eyes. Open your minds. Then close the fingers on your hand.
— Jay Kristoff, Stormdancer
A conscience is easier to swallow on an empty belly, simpler to swing with a broken wrist. The people who hate money are the ones who don’t have any. The people who hate power are the ones who are powerless
— Jay Kristoff, Stormdancer
The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.
— Bill Mollison