Quotes about revolution
page 8

“The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact.”

Huey P. Newton book Revolutionary Suicide

Source: Revolutionary Suicide (1973), p. 4

People, World, Thinking

“During the 1960s and 1970s, when cartographers were embracing the communication model and a behavioral approach to empirical research, psychology was undergoing a revolution in its perspective on what to study and how to study it. Psychologists began to realize that stimulus-response laws do not explain human perception or behavior (any more than the gravity models used by geographers can explain spatial interaction).”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 7-8

Law, Behavior, Communication, Study

“Although the [American] revolution grew out of economic and political causes, it represents primarily one of those costly and unfortunate internecine wars in which the Nordics have been prone to indulge at intervals for two or three thousand years, and which have done so much to weaken them as a race.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

War

“My aim for now is to lead a peaceful revolution to remove this regime. I think if I can be in the street with the people I can achieve more than if I am the president.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Tawakul Karman, Yemeni activist, and thorn in the side of Saleh (2011)

People, Peace, Thinking

“What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity… to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not harmonise or unify Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as Maya or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of life-power and the decline of India. The Gita says, utsideyur ime loka na kuryam karma cedaham ["These peoples would crumble to pieces if I did not do actions," 3.24]. Truly 'these peoples' of India have gone to ruin. What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few Sannyasins, Bairagis and Saddhus attain realisation and liberation, if a few Bhaktas dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and Ananda, and an entire race, devoid of life, devoid of intelligence, sinks to the depths of extreme tamas?… But now the time has come to take hold of the substance instead of extending the shadow. We have to awaken the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works…. I believe that the main cause of India's weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think… incapacity of thought or 'thought-phobia'…. The mediaeval period was a night, a time of victory for the man of ignorance; the modern world is a time of victory for the man of knowledge. It is the one who can fathom and learn the truth of the world by thinking more, searching more, labouring more, who will gain more Shakti. Look at Europe, and you will see two things: a wide limitless sea of thought and the play of a huge and rapid, yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe lies there. It is by virtue of this Shakti that she has been able to swallow the world, like our Tapaswins of old, whose might held even the gods of the universe in awe, suspense and subjection. People say that Europe is rushing into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions, all these upsettings are the initial stages of a new creation….. We, however, are not worshippers of Shakti; we are worshippers of the easy way…. Our civilisation has become ossified, our Dharma a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of intoxication. So long as this state of things lasts, any permanent resurgence of India is impossible…. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and so the Shakti has abandoned us…. You say what is needed is emotional excitement, to fill the country with enthusiasm. We did all that in the political field during the Swadeshi period; but all we did now lies in the dust…. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base. I want to make a vast and heroic equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, of the adhar [vessel] based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable Shakti; over that ocean of Shakti I want the vast radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples; it will be enough if I can get as instruments of God a hundred complete men free from petty egoism. I have no faith in the customary trade of guru. I do not want to be a guru. What I want is that a few, awakened at my touch or at that of another, will manifest from within their sleeping divinity and realise the divine life. It is such men who will raise this country.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1920, Letter to Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother, Translated from Bengali
India's Rebirth

Love, Life, Men, God

“And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

Source: The Broadside Tapes 1 (made in the 1960s; published c. 1980), Liner notes

Hope

“The idea that voting is pointless, democracy a façade, and that no one is representing ordinary people is more resonant than ever as I leave my ordinary town behind. Amidst the guilt and anger I feel in the back of the Führer-mobile, there is hope. Whilst it’s clear that on an individual, communal, and global level that radical change is necessary, I feel a powerful, transcendent optimism. I know change is possible, I know there is an alternative, because I live a completely different life to the one I was born with. I also know that the solution is not fame or money or any transient adornment of the individual. The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Life, Money, People, World

“Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Guardian (October 27, 1992)
1990s

Way

“He saw in memory Mendoza’s face, her black eyes sad as she downloaded a chapter on revolutions.
Here you go. Great heroes and the things they wrecked. Always easier to destroy something than to create something. It’s harder to plant a garden than to blow up a building, and undoubtedly more boring, but you just might need to do it one day, eh?”

Kage Baker book The Sons of Heaven

Source: The Sons of Heaven (2007), Chapter 32, Section 1 “Gray’s Inn Road” (p. 391)

Sadness, Memory

“The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Message to Chairman Khrushchev Concerning the Meaning of Events in Cuba (18 April 1961).
1961

History, Past, Future

“Not only, then, did Hitler do nothing to assist in the crushing of Munich’s ‘Red Republic’; he was an elected representative of his battalion during this whole period of existence. How to interpret this evidence is, nevertheless, not altogether clear. Since the Munich garrison had firmly backed the revolution since November, and again in April supported the radical move to the Räterepublik, the obvious implication must be that Hitler, in order to have been elected as a soldiers’ representative, voiced in these months the views of the socialist governments he later denounced with every fibre of his body as ‘criminal.”

Ian Kershaw (1943) British historian

Source: Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (1999), p. 118

Support

“Norway did not even have a revolution at the time the rest of Europe was busy figuring out human rights and stuff, because we were busy fighting over how to spell it.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: PART TWO: winning industrial-use of lisp: Re: Norvig's latest paper on Lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6cce7cd281ff6126 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Business, Time, Fight

“Always an extremist, [Mussolini] inclined to the belief of Babeuf and Blanqui in violent insurrection by a minority in order to establish authoritarian rule. His articles reveal a retreat from belief in class solidarity and a growing attachment to revolution for revolution’s sake, power for the sake of power.”

Denis Mack Smith (1920–2017) British historian

Source: Modern Italy: A Political History, 1959, p. 284

“We are in the grip of the second managerial revolution, one that's very different from the first. The first was about a transfer of power. This one is about an access of freedom.”

James A. Champy (1942) American businessman

Source: Reengineering management, 1995, p. 205

Freedom

“Rolling Stone: It's been 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational people can debate about whether technology has made the world a better place –
Jobs: The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

1990s

Money, People, World, Idea

“If you do not give the people reform they are going to give you social revolution.”

Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone (1907–2001) British judge, politician, life peer and Cabinet minister

As quoted in Social democracy - The enemy within by Harpal Brar, pg. 162.

People

“I am a Land Leaguer myself, and I would not be a Land Leaguer if it had anything behind it like revolution. I would fight against it.”

James Daly (Irish Land League) (1838–1911) Irish nationalist activist with the Irish National Land League

: Daly to the Bessborough Commission 1880.
Source: Moran 1994, page 195

Fight

“Neoconservatives are the boat people of the McGovern revolution.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

People

“Insurrection, n. An unsuccessful revolution. Disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Failure

“The Russian revolution was nominally based on Communist dogma; but its significant struggle was to find some instrument by which a vast backward country could be mauled into industrialization. The capitalist revolution in which the United States was the leader found apter, more efficient and more flexible means through collectivizing capital in corporations.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

Source: The 20th century capitalist revolution. 1954, p. 23

Country

“When I met Nasser, he said to me, "I see myself when I was young in you. You are the future for the Arab revolution." This meant very, very much to me.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

The Pittsburgh Press (3 August 1986) "Gadhafi, the man the world loves to hate" by Marie Colvin (UPI)

Future

“Americans are well aware that there has been a revolution. In morals. In manners. In speech. In crime rates. In riots. In violence. In drugs. In sex. In pornography. In politics. In movies. In education. In music. What most of us failed to realize at the moment was how important the music revolution would become. It turned out to be the catalyst for all the rest. It became the prod to promote drugs, the advertiser of sex in the hedonism manner, the mind-conditioner for four-letter gutter speech, and eventually the blatant propaganda funnel for political subversion. It also became the seductive Jezebel for a modern philosophy of no God, of Man as merely a graduate beast of the jungle, of Jesus Christ as a phoney actor--a superstar, of peace and prosperity being possible only under communism, of America as the enemy of the world, of Russia as the hope of the world.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

Preface to Rock 'N' Reality: Mirrors of Rock Music--Its Relationship to Sex, Drugs, Family and Religion (1971)

God, World, Education, Peace

“Historically speaking, the first wave of the punk/new wave (approximately 1976-1983) was primarily a movement of creative abuse of hardly-ever-used consumer media technology. Parents (usually technophile Baby boomer dads) bought expensive equipment like 8-track recorders, Super-8 and Polaroid cameras and later VHS camcorders and only used it to "document" birthday parties and other eminently boring ceremonies. But the rebellious teens found interesting new things to do with the dust-collecting media tech, and it started one of the biggest DIY revolutions of the 20th century. So punk (years before cyperpunk) was a movement of youngsters goofing around with (aka appropriating) consumer tech.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Mental Floss http://mentalfloss.com/article/79393/traceroute-documentary-about-nerds-and-annihilation

Birthday, Parent, Baby

“Why cannot the Irish get and save money in Ireland? And why must they cross the Atlantic before they can get hold of a piece of land? Our "territorial" system is one which works a wide and silent cruelty, beggaring, demoralising and destroying multitudes of our people. I should like to join a League sworn or pledged to its entire overthrow. There are facts enough afloat that would suffice to make a revolution in opinion with regard to it, and it follows logically on the Free Trade movement.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to Cobden (September 1849), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 164.
1840s

Money, People

“It seems, then, that the Greeks had not only derived from preceding nations, but had also, in some slight degree, deduced from their own observations, the theory of great periodical revolutions in the inorganic world.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 18
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

World

“Three revolutions mark the history of life on earth. The first was the origin of life itself… The second… was the origin of multicellular organisms… The origin of human consciousness… was the third… Life became aware of itself, and began to transform the world of nature to its own ends.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Life, World, History, Nature

“The American Revolution began with certain latent hopes that it might turn into a genuine break with the State ideal. The Declaration of Independence announced doctrines that were utterly incompatible not only with the century-old conception of the Divine Right of Kings, but also with the Divine Right of the State. … If revolution is justifiable a State may even be criminal sometimes in resisting its own extinction.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

¶9. Published under "The Development of the American State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), pp. 30–31. "The State" (1918), II

Hope

“It was Stalin, Lenin’s unnatural heir, who ‘in the early 1930s…injected the adrenalin of Russian nationalism into the Soviet political bloodstream’ in an effort to restore some vitality to what gave every appearance of a failed revolution.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 176

Effort, Appearance

“When one recalls the first months of the Workers' Government, months which were so rich in magnificent illusions, plans, ardent initiatives to improve life, to organize the world anew, months of the real romanticism of the Revolution, one would in fact like to write about all else save about one's self.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Life, World

“For tonight, as so many nights before, young Americans struggle and young Americans die in a distant land. Tonight, as so many nights before, the American Nation is asked to sacrifice the blood of its children and the fruits of its labor for the love of its freedom. How many times—in my lifetime and in yours—have the American people gathered, as they do now, to hear their President tell them of conflict and tell them of danger? Each time they have answered. They have answered with all the effort that the security and the freedom of this nation required. And they do again tonight in Vietnam. Not too many years ago Vietnam was a peaceful, if troubled, land. In the North was an independent Communist government. In the South a people struggled to build a nation, with the friendly help of the United States. There were some in South Vietnam who wished to force Communist rule on their own people. But their progress was slight. Their hope of success was dim. Then, little more than six years ago, North Vietnam decided on conquest. And from that day to this, soldiers and supplies have moved from North to South in a swelling stream that is swallowing the remnants of revolution in aggression. As the assault mounted, our choice gradually became clear. We could leave, abandoning South Vietnam to its attackers and to certain conquest, or we could stay and fight beside the people of South Vietnam. We stayed. And we will stay until aggression has stopped.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Love, Children, People, Peace

“In classical cultures, an ascended class had to justify itself before those now below in the social structure. But the culture revolution of our time has eliminated this need for class- as well as self-justification. Nevertheless, those below still seek to emulate the ascendant social class, without being convinced of its superiority.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

Time

“I had entered the communist children's movement, an organisation called the Young Pioneers of America, in 1930 in New York City; I was only nine years of age. And I'd gone through the entire '30s as a—Stalinist—initially, and then increasingly as someone who was more and more sympathetic to Trotskyism. And by 1939, after having seen Hitler rise to power, the Austrian workers revolt of 1934 (an almost completely forgotten episode in labour history), the Spanish revolution by which I mean the so-called Spanish civil war—I finally became utterly disillusioned with Stalinism, and drifted increasingly toward Trotskyism. And by 1945, I, finally, also became disillusioned with Trotskyism; and I would say, now, increasingly with Marxism and Leninism.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)

War, Children, Age, History

“The Revolution had been made by voluptuaries.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

La Révolution a été faite par des voluptueux. "Les liaisons dangereuses," Appendix to L'art romantique http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Art_romantique_-_Appendice L'art romantique (1869)

“Halliburton is not a "company" doing business in Iraq. It is a WAR PROFITEER, bilking millions from the pockets of average Americans. In past wars they would have been arrested — or worse.
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

2004

War, Business, Past

“For Fascists, the state, animated by a profound sense of unity, was understood to be the ‘educator of civic virtue, rendering citizens conscious of their historic mission.’ Italy was to be Fascist, and Fascism was to be Italy. The nation was to be one indissoluble union; the interest of each was to be the interest of all. By 1929, what had emerged from the Fascist revolution was an unmistakable variant of the Gentilean neo-Hegelian state.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 62

Education, Sense, Animals

“It is impossible for the mind which is not totally destitute of piety, to behold the sublime, the awful, the amazing works of creation and providence — the heavens with their luminaries, the mountains, the ocean, the storm, the earthquake, the volcano, the circuit of the seasons, and the revolutions of empires — without marking in them all the mighty hand of God, and feeling strong emotions of reverence toward the Author of these stupendous works.”

Timothy Dwight IV (1752–1817) American historian

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 273.

God, Feeling, Mountain, Strong

“The Internet is powerful because it allows people to organise around issues at unprecedented speed, broadcast their thoughts and challenge those in charge. A wave of such groups banded together in early 2011 to demand the removal of authoritarian leaders in the Middle East as one country after another rose up with varying degrees of success. But the Internet doesn't cause revolution. It is a communications network. What people choose to do with technology - that is where we can make moral judgements. Some people will use it for ill, others for good. Security forces tend to focus on the ills, while the majority use it for good. In the name of protecting us from 'bad things on the Internet' there are increasing moves to suppress communications networks in both repressive and democratic countries. Demands to shut down, censor, filter or in other ways oversee and control the way people communicate are on the rise.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page xi.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

People, Way, Communication, Success

“Some of the Etudes in the first set, opus 10, were written by the time Chopin was twenty. It is with these pieces that Chopin's style was fully revealed in all its power and subtlety. Later works are sometimes more ambitious and, in a few cases, more audacious, but there were no radical changes of style, nothing to compare to the later revolutions we find in the careers of Haydn and Beethoven, or even in the shorter lives of Mozart and Schubert. Chopin's mastery was proven with the twelve Etudes of opus 10.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

Change, Time

“It would be difficult for me to go back [permanently] to Cuba because Miami is my city... That's where we have made our life. That's were I feel at home... But I would love to be, you know, whatever help I can be [post-Castro] to the people who will be leading themselves. I do think Cuba does have to find its leadership from within. They have a very different society from what we are used to. They are going to need certain things that a democracy might not provide right away. And I don't think it's going to be as quick a change. I think [Castro's] death will bring change, needless to say. But I think his brother [Raul] will try to save the specter of the revolution for quite a while. And maybe start doing some opening [to improve U. S.-Cuba relations]. That is what I feel will happen.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

BBC radio interview (December 13, 2006)
2007, 2008

Love, Life, Death, People

“[W]hat is happening is what left-wing revolutions do tend to produce, whether they’re talking about the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution, and that is students – the next generation of revolutionaries – become not only more radical than their radical professors, but they turn on them so the revolution tends to consume its own. So now people who think of themselves of impeccably left-wing will say something that offends some group of radicalized students – perhaps students that they themselves helped to radicalize – and suddenly they are the ones under fire for not conforming sufficiently to the contemporary orthodoxy.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

2016, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

People, Thinking, Help

“Recorded history starts with a patriarchal revolution. Let it continue with the matriarchal counterrevolution that is the only hope for the survival of the human race.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex (N.Y.: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1971 (Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 79-150582)), p. 18 (Introduction)

Hope, History

“I am one of what must be an increasing number who find the portentous moralisings of A. Solzhenitsyn a bore and an irritation. Scarcely any aspect of life in the countries where he passes his voluntary exile has failed to incur his pessimistic censure. Coming from Russia, where freedom of the press has been not so much unknown as uncomprehended since long before the Revolution, he is shocked to discover that a free press disseminated all kinds of false, partial and invented information and that journalists contradict themselves from one day to the next without shame and without apology. Only a Russian would find all that surprising, or fail to understand that freedom which is not misused is not freedom at all.

Like all travellers he misunderstands what he observes. It simply is not true that ‘within the Western countries the press has become more powerful than the legislative power, the executive and the judiciary’. The British electorate regularly disprove this by electing governments in the teeth of the hostility and misrepresentation of virtually the whole of the press. Our modern Munchhausen has, however, found a more remarkable mare’s nest still: he has discovered the ‘false slogan, characteristic of a false era, that everyone is entitled to know everything’. Excited by this discovery he announces a novel and profound moral principle, a new addendum to the catalogue of human rights. ‘People,’ he says, ‘have a right not to know, and it is a more valuable one.’ Not merely morality but theology illuminates the theme: people have, say Solzhenitsyn, ‘the right not to have their divine souls’ burdened with ‘the excessive flow of information’.

Just so. Whatever may be the case in Russia, we in the degenerate West can switch off the radio or television, or not buy a newspaper, or not read such parts of it as we do not wish to. I can assure Solzhenitsyn that the method works admirably, ‘right’ or ‘no right’. I know, because I have applied it with complete success to his own speeches and writings.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Letter in answer to Solzhenitsyn's Harvard statement (21 June 1978), from Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 577
1970s

Life, Hostility, People, Travel

“In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

“Of the radical and iconoclastic ideals preached in the early years of the revolution, all were discarded except those which helped the state to exert absolute control over the individual. Hence the idea of collective education and reduction of parental authority to the minimum continued to hold sway, but an end was put to "progressive" educational methods designed to promote initiative and independence. Strict discipline became once more the rule, and in this respect Soviet schools differed from Tsarist ones only in the immensely increased emphasis on indoctrination. In due course, puritanical sexual ethics were restored to favour.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 53
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Education, School, Idea, Parent

“I feel that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that tied me to the Cuban revolution in its territory, and I say farewell to you, to the comrades, to your people, who now are mine.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Farewell letter to Fidel Castro (1965)

People, Feeling, Parting

“In all our plans for the future, we are re-defining and we are re-stating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution. But that revolution cannot become a reality unless we are prepared to make far-reaching changes in economic and social attitudes which permeate our whole system of society. The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Labour Party conference (1 October 1963), quoted in Labour Party Annual Conference Report, 1963, pp. 139-140. Usually quoted as "the white heat of the technological revolution".
Leader of the Opposition

Reality, Change, Future

“Whether the influence of increasing returns on trade and geography is rising or falling, one thing is clear: much was learned from the intellectual revolution that brought increasing returns into the heart of how we think about the world economy. It wasn't just that economists could make sense of previously puzzling data, we found ourselves able to see things that had previously been in an intellectual blind spot. Many people contributed to this process of enlightenment; I'm proud to have been a part of the journey.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography", The American Economic Review (Jun., 2009)

People, World, Thinking, Sense

“Black theology cannot accept a view of God which does not represent God as being for oppressed blacks and thus against white oppressors. Living in a world of white oppressors, blacks have no time for a neutral God. The brutalities are too great and the pain too severe, and this means we must know where God is and what God is doing in the revolution. There is no use for a God who loves white oppressors the same as oppressed blacks. We have had too much of white love, the love that tells blacks to turn the other cheek and go the second mile. What we need is the divine love as expressed in black power, which is the power of blacks to destroy their oppressors, here and now, by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject God's love.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), p. 70

Love, God, Pain, World

“When the war is over, in the world's social revolution that will be followed by a more equitable distribution of the earth's riches, due account must be kept of the sacrifices and of the discipline maintained by the Italian workers. The Fascist revolution will make another decisive step to shorten social distances.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Mussolini’s speech in Rome, Italy, February 23, 1941. Published in the New York Times, February 24, 1941.
1940s

War, World, Decision

“Anything new will have to come along with the type of revolution that came along with Unix. Nothing was going to topple IBM until something came along that made them irrelevant. I'm sure they have the mainframe market locked up, but that's just irrelevant. And the same thing with Microsoft: until something comes along that makes them irrelevant, the entry fee is too difficult and they won't be displaced.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

"Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson," 1999

“What Jerry [Rubin] doesn’t seem to be able to get is the fact that if we all go out and Do It! and smash the current state that we will end up with something quite worse. Even if successful, the anarchists are always the first to go once the revolution is consummated. The vacuum is always filled by power.”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left Today: American Trojan Horse (1971), p. 125

Success

“All of you now what the situation was before the Revolution. All of you know of the regime which we have exterminated. It was that regime which was mercilessly destroying all the sincere people who stood in its way in the course of the struggle for God, for the people and for the homeland.”

Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq

Speech delivered at the officers' club (June 16, 1959).
Principles of the 14th July Revolution (1959)

God, People, Way, Sincerity

“The fact that arithmetic and geometry took such a notable step forward… was due in no small measure to the introduction of Egyptian papyrus into Greece. This event occurred about 650 B. C., and the invention of printing in the 15th century did not more surely effect a revolution in thought than did this introduction of writing material on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea just before the time of Thales.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

History of Mathematics (1923) Vol.1

Time, Sea

“Our agrarian revolution has been a process in which the landlord class owning the land is transformed into a class that has lost its land, while the peasants who once lost their land are transformed into small holders who have acquired land, and it will be such a process once again. In given conditions having and not having, acquiring and losing, are interconnected; there is identity of the two sides. Under socialism, private peasant ownership is transformed into the public ownership of socialist agriculture; this has already taken place in the Soviet Union, as it will take place everywhere else. There is a bridge leading from private property to public property, which in philosophy is called identity, or transformation into each other, or interpenetration.”

Mao Zedong book On Contradiction

On Contradiction (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 我们实行过的土地革命，已经是并且还将是这样的过程，拥有土地的地主阶级转化为失掉土地的阶级，而曾经是失掉土地的农民却转化为取得土地的小私有者。有无、得失之间，因一定条件而互相联结，二者具有同一性。在社会主义条件之下，农民的私有制又将转化为社会主义农业的公有制，苏联已经这样做了，全世界将来也会这样做。私产和公产之间有一条由此达彼的桥梁，哲学上名之曰同一性，或互相转化、互相渗透。

“Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child.
A ritual, more compelling than ever devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forebears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe’s childhood.
The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter ‘Weep’. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak ‘Rejoice!’ O little revolution in great shades!”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 1, section 1 (p. 399; opening words)

Law, Fight, Childhood

“The new way of thinking, spawned by the cognitive revolution, shows strong promise … Reversing previous doctrine in science, the new paradigm affirms that the world we live in is driven not solely by mindless physical forces but, more crucially, by subjective human values. Human values become the underlying key to world change.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

No page reference found; as quoted in "Search for Beliefs to Live by Consistent with Science" in Zygon, Journal of Religion & Science 26 p. 237–258
Science and the Problem of Values (1972)

World, Way, Thinking, Strong

“Communist ethics make it the highest duty to accept the necessity to act wickedly. This, he said, was the greatest sacrifice the revolution asked from us. The conviction of the true communist is that evil transforms itself into bliss through the dialectics of historical evolution.”

György Lukács (1885–1971) Marxist philosopher and literary critic

Quoted in "Utopia & Revolution: On the Origins of a Metaphor" by Melvin Jonah Lasky, pg 53. Transaction Publishers, 1976
Attributed

Evil

“The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B. C. …the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

World, History, Time

“The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution.”

Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) American political and social activist

Source: Revolution for the Hell of It (1968), p. 184.

Education, Way, Parting

“In the prosecution of these researches… extraneous fossils were no longer regarded merely as subjects of natural history, but as memorials of revolutions which have swept over the face of the earth, in ages antecedent to all human record and tradition.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

The Fossils of the South Downs; or Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex (1822)

Age, History, Nature, Memory

“The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Original: (fr) Le gouvernement de la révolution est le despotisme de la liberté contre la tyrannie. Source: Speech to the National Convention http://www.royet.org/nea1789-1794/archives/discours/robespierre_principes_morale_politique_05_02_94.htm (5 February 1794)

“This is a counter-revolution. After half a century of democratic advance, of social revolution, of rising expectations, the whole process has ground to a halt with a fourteenth Earl.”

Alec Douglas-Home (1903–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

"Labour would reject move to postpone M.P.s' return", The Times, 21 October 1963, p. 6.
Harold Wilson speaking at Manchester, 19 October 1963, shortly after Douglas-Home's appointment as Prime Minister.
About

“Why to bring revolution? They are also human beings. Why don’t we treat ourselves as human beings? I speak Hindi and you speak your native language, but we are all human beings. Why do you treat them as foreigners? They also want to adapt to our tradition- some are visiting temples, they become vegetarians, some have given up spoons and eat using their hands, they try to become Sadhus. Why do you want to treat them as foreigners, they are human beings! If we get influenced by their tradition, it’s okay. If they get influenced by our tradition, it’s okay. Younger generation who try to emulate them will eventually come back to their native tradition!”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

On Western Culture and the so-called Revolution.
Melodies of Brindavan: Pandit Hariprasad Chourasia

“The consolidation of State capitalism in Russia itself was the determining basis for the character of the Communist Party. Whilst in its foreign propaganda it continued to speak of communism and world revolution, decried capitalism, called upon the workers to join in the fight for freedom, the workers in Russia were a subjected and exploited class, living mostly in miserable working conditions, under a strong and oppressive dictatorial rule, without freedom of speech, of press, of association, more strongly enslaved than their brethren under Western capitalism. Thus an inherent falsehood must pervade politics and teachings of that party. … The doctrine it taught under the name of Marxism was not the theory of the overthrow of highly developed capitalism by a highly developed working class, but its caricature. … The Communist Party did not intend to make the workers independent fighters capable by their force of insight themselves to build their new world, but to make them obedient followers ready to put the party into power.”

Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist

Workers Councils (1947), Section 2.5

World, Communication, Freedom, Strong

“At its climaxes this Nazi revolution was always half a Wagner opera. The other half was cunning conspiracy.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), pp. 41-42

“George Washington's long struggle for freedom has also inspired generations of Americans to stand for freedom in their own time. Today, we're fighting a new war to defend our liberty and our people and our way of life. And as we work to advance the cause of freedom around the world, we remember that the father of our country believed that the freedoms we secured in our revolution were not meant for Americans alone. He once wrote, "My best wishes are irresistibly excited whensoever in any country I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom." President Washington believed that the success of our democracy would also depend on the virtue of our citizens. In his farewell address to the American people, he said, "Morality is a necessary spring of popular government." Over the centuries, America has succeeded because we have always tried to maintain the decency and the honor of our first President. His example guided us in his time; it guides us in our time, and it will guide us for all time.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

President Bush Visits Mount Vernon, Honors President Washington's 275th Birthday on President's Day http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/02/20070219.html (February 19, 2007) 2000s, 2007

Life, War, People, World

“There were two parts of the Greek-speaking world at this time which did not suffer from revolution and did not seek to impose rule over the city states. In Epirus there were three clusters of tribal states, called Molossia, Thesprotia and Chaonia[…]the other part of the Greek-speaking world extended from Pelagonia in the north to Macedonia in the south. It was occupied by several tribal states, which were constantly at war against Illyrians, Paeonians and Thracians.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"The Genius of Alexander the Great", p.11, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd (November 26, 2004)

War, World, Suffering, Time

“A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death.”

Boris Sidis The Source and Aim of Human Progress

The Source and Aim of Human Progress (1919)

Death, Law, Loss, Personality

“A review of our party's seventy-plus-year history elicits an important conclusion. Our party earned the people's support during the historical periods of revolution, construction and reform because it always represented the requirements for developing China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The party also earned popular support because it fought tirelessly to realize the fundamental interests of the country and the people by formulating a correct line, principles and policies. Today, humanity once again stands at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. How our party can better effectuate the Three Represents under the new historical conditions is a major issue all Party comrades, especially high-ranking party cadres, must consider deeply.”

Jiang Zemin (1926) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China

Three Represents (25 February 2000).
2000s

People, History, Support, Country

“This is what Keynes had meant when he warned of the dangers of economic chaos—you never know what combination of rage, racism and revolution will be unleashed.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

Rage

“Sraffa’s criticisms of the concept of capital also amount – at least in principle –to a deadly blow to the foundations of the so-called ‘neo-classical synthesis’. Combining Keynes’ thesis on the possibility of fighting unemployment by adopting adequate fiscal and monetary policies with the marginalist tradition of simultaneous determination of equilibrium quantities and prices as a method to study any economic problem, this approach has in the last few decades come to constitute the dominant doctrine in textbooks the whole world over. It is only thanks to increasing specialisation in the various fields of economics, often invoked as the inevitable response to otherwise insoluble difficulties, that the theoreticians of general equilibrium are able to construct their models without considering the problem of relations with the real world that economists are supposed to be interpreting, and that the macroeconomists can pretend that their ‘one commodity models’ constitute an acceptable tool for analysis. For those who believe that the true task facing economists, hard as it may be, is to seek to interpret the world they live in, Sraffa’s ‘cultural revolution’ still marks out a path for research that may not (as yet) have yielded all it was hoped to, but is certainly worth pursuing.”

Alessandro Roncaglia (1947) Italian economist

Source: Piero Sraffa: His life, thought and cultural heritage (2000), Ch. 1. Piero Sraffa

World, Hope, Problem, Study

“What is necessary is for workers and the left to obtain all the lessons the Chilean experience can offer, so that we never again make these errors. That’s why I maintain, that in Chile the left has not failed, socialism has not failed, nor has the revolution failed, nor have workers failed. What came to a tragic end in Chile was the reformist illusion of modifying socio-economic structures and making revolutions before the pasive consent of those to be most affected: the ruling classes.”

Miguel Enríquez (1944–1974) Chilean politician

Answer to the question: "In your opinion does the downfall of the left cancel for a long period the struggle for socialism in Chile?"

Error

“Says Oliver Cromwell: "What are all histories but God manifesting Himself, that He hath shaken down and trampled under foot whatsoever He hath not planted?" History is not a series of jumbled happenings. God is in the facts of history as truly as He is in the march of the seasons, the revolution of the planets, or the architecture of the worlds.”

John Lanahan (1815–1903)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 426.

God, World, History, Season

“The Green Revolution was criticised by social activists on the ground that the high-yield technology involving the use of mineral fertilizers and chemical pesticides is environmentally harmful. Similarly, some economists felt that the new technologies would bypass small and marginal farmers, for although the technologies are scale-neutral, they are not resource-neutral. This led to my coining the term “ever-green revolution,” to emphasise the need to enhance productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm.”

M. S. Swaminathan (1925) Indian scientist

Quoted in Food as people's right, 4 January 2012, 25 November 2013, The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/food-as-peoples-right/article2769348.ece,

“It seemed to him that the Order of St Clement labored under the curse of mediocrity, and had done so almost from the beginning. In Europe, the Clementines hadn't (it was always said) recovered from the French Revolution. It was certain that they hadn't ever really got going in the New World. Their history revealed little to brag about-one saint (the Holy Founder) and a few bishops of missionary sees, no theologians worthy of the name, no original thinkers, not even a scientist. The Clementines were unique in that they were noted for nothing at all. They were in bad shape all over the world. The Chicago province was probably better off than the others, but that wasn't saying much. Their college was failing, their high schools were a breakeven proposition at best, and their parishes, except for a few, were in unsettled parts of Texas and New Mexico where no order in its right mind would go. The latest white elephant was an abandoned sanitarium in rural Minnesota! But that was typical of Father Boniface and the rest of them. They just didn't know a bad thing when they saw it-or a good one.”

J. F. Powers (1917–1999) American writer

Morte d’Urban (1962)

World, School, History, Parting

“Great strategic links are being developed abroad to destroy our Revolution. Those forces are trying to attract all those who have been hurt by the Revolution. We do not refer to the embezzlers, criminals, or the members of the old government; we are thinking of those who have remained on the margin of this revolutionary process, those who have lost economically but support the Revolution in a limited way.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech to University students (1959)

Way, Support, Thinking, Hurt

“Free markets are the real people's revolution.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

People

“Students, young people, have the right to join together in order to guide their efforts towards a common goal, and they will use this right. As for their goal, it is simple: for them it is a matter of ensuring that the July revolution is not a lie; every edifice built by the Empire and the Restoration must be overthrown, and since not one single stone of this edifice is yet to fall, they will work indefatigably to demolish and destroy it. We call for the destruction of the university. We call for the destruction of the country’s most odious and harmful monopoly, of that which stifles civilization at its source and which is the cruellest insult inflicted on human intelligence.”

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) French socialist and political activist

"Declaration of the Provisional Committee for Schools" (1831)

People, Lie, Intelligence, Effort

“The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760s was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640s, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 198.

War, World, Idea

“Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of "Emergency". It was a tactic of Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini… The invasion of New Deal Collectivism was introduced by this same Trojan horse.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Source: The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (1952), p. 357

Horse

“It is only with this prelude that the Declaration of 1776 proclaims the right to revolution. The people do not have an indiscriminate or uncontrolled right to establish or to abolish governments. They have a right to abolish only those governments that become "destructive of these ends". "These ends" refers to the security of equal natural rights. It is only for the sake of security of these rights that legitimate governments are instituted, or that governments may be altered or abolished. And governments are legitimate only insofar as their "just powers" are derived "from the consent of the governed". All of the foregoing is omitted from South Carolina's declaration, for obvious reasons. In no sense could it have been said that the slaves in South Carolina were governed by powers derived from their consent. Nor could it be said that South Carolina was separating itself from the government of the Union because that government had become destructive of the ends for which it was established. South Carolina in 1860 had an entirely different idea of what the ends of government ought to be from that of 1776 or 1787. That difference can be summed up in the difference between holding slavery to be an evil, if possibly a necessary evil, and holding it to be a positive good.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 231

People, Idea, Nature, Sense

“I am not for separatism from the United States. My motto is justice but not independence from or revolution against the United States.”

Reies Tijerina (1926–2015) American activist

Quoted in Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America by Tony Castro, ISBN 0841503214.

Justice

“The productive revolution.”

Carlos Menem (1930) Argentine politician who was President of Argentina from 1989 to 1999

Clarín del Domingo 9 de Agosto de 1998: Menem defendió el modelo y habló de revolución productiva http://www.clarin.com/diario/1998/08/09/o-00401d.htm.