“A revolutionist is born, not made.”
Talks with Mussolini, interviewer Emil Ludwig, Boston: MA, Little, Brown and Company, 1933, p. 66. Interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
1930s
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Benito Mussolini 127
Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Le… 1883–1945Related quotes
“Let Revolutionists be Romans, not Tatars.”
Speech to the National Convention (March 17, 1794). [Source: Saint-Just quoted in Eugene N. Curtis, Saint-Just: Colleague of Robespierre (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), p. 228]
“The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it.”
Spoken to police immediately prior to his arrest at the Lincoln Hotel Restaurant in Chicago (August 1968), quoting himself in "Creating the Perfect Mess" (1 September 1968) in Revolution for the Hell of It (1968); also quoted in Abbie Hoffman : American Rebel (1992) by Marty Jezer.
Source: Steal This Book
Context: The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain't going.
“A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.”
“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 67
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 451
Source: The Education of Henry Adams
“Christians are made, not born.”
Fiunt non nascuntur Christiani
A variant on “One is not born wise, but becomes wise” from Seneca the Younger On Anger 2.10.6; see: Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire: the witness of Tertullian, by Tertullian, Robert Dick Sider, p. 38 http://books.google.com/books?id=-qezxQeuutYC&pg=PA38&dq=%22Christians+are+made,+not+born%22, footnote 79
Variant: Many variants on this exist, notably “Great lovers are made, not born.” and “(Great) leaders are made, not born.”
Source: Apologeticus pro Christianis, Chapter 18
“Ruffed grouse dogs are bred, not born, and once born they are developed, not made.”
An Affair with Grouse (1982)
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXXII : Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret
Context: To organize Anarchy, is the problem which the revolutionists have and will eternally have to resolve. It is the rock of Sisyphus that will always fall back upon them. To exist a single instant, they are and always will be by fatality reduced to improvise a despotism without other reason of existence than necessity, and which, consequently, is violent and blind as Necessity. We escape from the harmonious monarchy of Reason, only to fall under the irregular dictatorship of Folly.
Sometimes superstitious enthusiasms, sometimes the miserable calculations of the materialist instinct have led astray the nations, and God at last urges the world on toward believing Reason and reasonable Beliefs.
We have had prophets enough without philosophy, and philosophers without religion; the blind believers and the skeptics resemble each other, and are as far the one as the other from the eternal salvation.