
“This is not a Budget, but a revolution; a social and political revolution of the first magnitude.”
Letter to the The Times attacking the "People's Budget" (22 June 1909), p. 8.
From 1980s onwards, Norie Huddle interview (1981)
Context: This is not a visible revolution and it is not political. You’re dealing with the invisible world of technology.
Politics is absolutely hopeless. That’s why everything has gone wrong. You have ninety-nine percent of the people thinking “politics,” and hollering and yelling. And that won’t get you anywhere. Hollering and yelling won’t get you across the English Channel. It won’t reach from continent to continent; you need electronics for that, and you have to know what you’re doing. Evolution has been at work doing all these things so it is now possible. Nobody has consciously been doing it. The universe is a lot bigger than you and me. We didn’t invent it. If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine.
“This is not a Budget, but a revolution; a social and political revolution of the first magnitude.”
Letter to the The Times attacking the "People's Budget" (22 June 1909), p. 8.
Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 195
Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 9
“Dare! — this word contains all the politics of our revolution.”
Osez! — ce mot renferme toute la politique de notre révolution.
Speech to the National Convention (February 26, 1794) http://books.google.com/books?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22ce%20mot%20renferme%20toute%20la%20politique%20de%22&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wp; though widely published in the above form, this has sometimes been misquoted in some recent publications http://www.royet.org/nea1789-1794/archives/discours/stjust_suspects_incarceres_26_02_94.htm as: Osez! — ce mot renferme toute la politique de votre révolution. [Dare! — this word contains all the politics of your revolution.]
Letter to the downthrown Czechoslovak Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubček (August 1969), as translated in Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5 : The Politics of Hope, p. 115
“In terms of political geography, The French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages.”
Source: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 4, War
Source: 2010s, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012), Chapter One
Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter I : The Coming American Revolution, p. 4
Context: There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty — a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land.
This is the revolution of the new generation.
2010s, Tawakul Karman, Yemeni activist, and thorn in the side of Saleh (2011)
Source: Reform or Revolution (1899), Ch. 8