“There are decades when weeks happen, and weeks when decades happen.”
or: There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.
Always without citation but supposedly describing the Russian Revolution; earliest quotes online dating ~2005-2006 "Exposing the Big Lie: Interview with George Galloway by Eric Ruder" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Europe/ExposingBigLie_GGalloway.html
"Johann Hari: Why won't Israel just exchange prisoners? This is such a wacky, left-wing ideal that it was pursued by Ariel Sharon two years ago" http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-why-wont-israel-just-exchange-prisoners-6094888.html, 19 July 2006; popularized describing the Arab Spring. May be loosely based on a similar phrasing by Karl Marx:
How soon the English workers will throw off what seems to be a bourgeois contagion remains to be seen. So far as the main theses in your book [Condition of the Working Class in England] are concerned, by the by, they have been corroborated down to the very last detail by developments subsequent to 1844. For I have again been comparing the book with the notes I made on the ensuing period. Only your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell and by what he happens to think are ‘interesting news items’, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.
Letter, Marx to Engels, 9 April 1863 in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence 1965, 140 http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1863/letters/63_04_09.htm
Misattributed
