
"Inaugural address of Premier Tadeusz Mazowiecki" https://polishfreedom.pl/en/document/statement-inaugural-address-of-the-prime-minister-tadeusz-mazowiecki-delivered-at-the-seym-session-on-12th-september-1989 (12 September 1989)
Source: Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies - (Second Edition), Chapter 1, How Does an Idea's Time Come?, p. 1
"Inaugural address of Premier Tadeusz Mazowiecki" https://polishfreedom.pl/en/document/statement-inaugural-address-of-the-prime-minister-tadeusz-mazowiecki-delivered-at-the-seym-session-on-12th-september-1989 (12 September 1989)
“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
Variant: No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come
“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Often attributed to Hugo as a paraphrase of a similar idea in his Histore d'un Crime (1877): "One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas", the wording of this famous statement actually more closely resembles a passage from the relatively obscure Les Francs-Tireurs (1861) by Gustave Aimard, p. 68 https://books.google.com/books/about/Les_francs_tireurs.html?id=mKI4AQAAIAAJ:
Il y a quelque chose de plus puissant que la force brutale des baïonnettes: c'est l'idée dont le temps est venu et l'heure est sonnée.
There is something more powerful than the brute force of bayonets: it is the idea whose time has come and hour struck.
Translated into English as The Freebooters : A Story of the Texan War (1861) https://archive.org/details/freebootersstory00aima, p. 57, Ward & Lock edition
Misattributed
Variant: More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”
“Everything you rejected and pushed aside—take it up again.”
J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 106
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)
“What’s coming is reality. Politics has nothing to do with reality!”
Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 14 (p. 269)
Quote from 1977, re: The Hunger Project
[178, Larson's Book of World Religions and Alternative Spirituality, Bob Larson, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2004, 084236417X]
Attributed
Source: Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015), p. 11.
Context: Classification is real, but it is based much more on a set of social definitions than on genetic distinctions. Legally defined categories for race differ from one country to another, and they change over time depending largely on the social and political realities of a particular society or nation. The notion of discrete racial categories arose mostly as an artifact of centuries-long immigration history coupled with overriding worldviews that white superiority was inherent, a purported genetic destiny that has no basis in modern science.