Best 1601 quotes in «revolution quotes» category

There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

the rebels of 1905, at the frontier on which they stand united, teach us, to the sound of exploding bombs, that rebellion cannot lead, without ceasing to be rebellion, to consolation and to the comforts of dogma. Their only evident victory is to triumph at least over solitude and negation. In the midst of a world which they deny and which rejects them, they try, man after man, like all the great-hearted ones, to reconstruct a brotherhood of man. The love they bear for one another, which brings them happiness even in the desert of a prison, which extends to the great mass of their enslaved and silent fellow men, gives the measure of their distress and of their hopes. To serve this love, they must first kill; to inaugurate the reign of innocence, they must accept a certain culpability. This contradiction will be resolved for them only at the very last moment. Solitude and chivalry, renunciation and hope will only be surmounted by the willing acceptance of death.

There I find an Ark torn asunder and a Vicegerent over Yonder

There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning though a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial. While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism.

There is a ladder to Success! Choose to climb it.

There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war.

There is no country on earth which does need no revolution!

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

There is no need to create the capitalist preconditions of communism any more. Capitalism is everywhere, yet much less visible than one hundred or fifty years ago when class distinctions ostensibly showed up. The manual worker identified the factory owner at one glance, knew or thought he knew his enemy, and felt he'd be better off the day he and his mates got rid of the boss. Today classes still exist, but manifested through infinite degrees in consumption, and no-one expects a better world from public ownership of industry. The "enemy" is an impalpable social relationship, abstract yet real, all-pervading yet no monster beyond our reach: because the proletarians are the ones that produce and reproduce the world, they can disrupt and revolutionise it. The aim of a future revolution will be immediate communisation, not fully completed before a generation or more, but to be started from the beginning. Capital has invaded life, and determines how we eat, sleep, love, visit, or bury friends, to such an extent that our objective can only be the social fabric, invisible, all- encompassing. Although capital is quite good at hiring personnel to defend it, social inertia is a greater conservative force than media or police.

There is nothing illogical in the desire of the "have-nots" to appropriate the wealth of the "haves"; in fact, it is part and parcel of the law of animal life. The bear robs the hive and the wolf the fold, and when "nature red in tooth and claw" is stretched into its human dimension, there is nothing irrational in Marx's theory that, granted the power, one social class should devour another. But what is irrational is, to assume that by robbing the hive the bear will assume the industry of the bee, or by robbing the fold the wolf will become as pacific as the sheep. It is astonishing that a man of Marx's high intelligence could have believed in ritualistic cannibalism on the social plane; that by wresting the forces of production from the bourgeoisie and centralizing them in the hands of the proletariat, the proletariat would automatically aacquire the skills of the ruling class. And it is equally astonishing that a man of Lenin's mental calibre could have attempted to put this magic into practice.

There is nothing revolutionary, only causes and effects - the choice which reality to create is ours!

There is nothing your knife handlers can do in the way of rioting and demonstrating that will have any permanent effect as long as, in the extremity, there is an army equipped with kinetic, chemical, and neurological weapons that is willing to use them against your people. You can get all the downtrodden and even all the respectables on your side, but you must somehow win over the security forces and the Imperial army or at least seriously weaken their loyalty to the rulers.

There is often talk of human rights, but it is also necessary to talk of the rights of humanity. Why should some people walk barefoot, so that others can travel in luxurious cars? Why should some live for thirty-five years, so that others can live for seventy years? Why should some be miserably poor, so that others can be hugely rich? I speak on behalf of the children in the world who do not have a piece of bread. I speak on the behalf of the sick who have no medicine, of those whose rights to life and human dignity have been denied.

There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate." (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) "And it looks to me as if it is going to go on, because the French aren't going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren't, because they can't. They're fighting with their backs the the wall." "I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war," he lied. "That's the least of my worries. When that comes, we've had it. You can't sit around mooning about Judgement Day. That's just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing's changed at all.

The Revolutionaries of all times have not known that anarchy, being the conflict of Lusts and the fatal reign of Violence, substitutes might for right, and paves the way ever for the rule of the most audaciously criminal.

The revolution doesn't carry the bible. The resistance doesn't carry the American flag. Feel how you wanna feel about it.

The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.

The Revolution of our time will be made from the bottom up— or it will not be made at all.

The Revolution won't be televised. It's already available on Amazon in ebook format.

There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution and good brew. The taste of one immediately brought to mind the other.

The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies

The revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply ‘the other’, ‘an object’, ‘commodity’, ‘thing’. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment. It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain.

The revolution goes on; a man does not make the revolution, not a thousand men, not an army and not a party; the revolution comes from the people as they reach toward God, and a little of God is in each person and each will not forget it. This it is the revolution when slaves shake their chains and the revolution when a strong man bends toward a weaker and says, "Here, comrade, is my arm." The revolution goes on and nothing stops it; but because the people are seeking what is good, not what is wicked or powerful or cruel or rich or venal, but simply what is good--because of that the people flounder and feel along one dark road after another. The people no more all-seeing than their rulers once were; it is in intention that they differ.

The Revolutionary War was fought over soft drinks.

The revolution lasted six minutes and covered one hundred an twelve meters.

The revolution of today is the oppression of tomorrow.

There was no justice in rebellion. This Javert had come to believe after seeing Marseille fall headfirst into the abyss of the revolution.

There was nothing malicious in their questions, just bewilderment. When you talk to people, they change their opinion about you. People without cotton wads in their ears can change their minds quickly.

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife. And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways. Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.

The right to make revolution is unconditional, for it alone establishes right.

The risen Christ! Once more faith is upon us, a jubilant brief keening with respite: Obedience, bitter joy, the elements, clouds, winds, louvres where the bell makes its wild mouths: Holy Rus – into the rain’s horizons, peacock-dyed tail feathers of storm, so it goes on.

The role of an activist is not to lead the masses with a flag draped around his or her shoulders. Activists meet a few people at a time in a coffee shop to explain in hushed tones why they should believe when no one else does. An activist’s moment is not the moment of change; it is the period when change seems impossible.

The romanticism of struggle is over. What remains are the utterly naked facts. The cult of personality and its collapse. Rethinking of everything. The masks are off (the mask of religion, the mask of heroism…).

The Sabbat arose as a conspiracy to destroy the rotten edifice of Church and State, meeting on the heath to avoid the gaze of authority, guised in anonymity and foreboding. This revolutionized the nature of witchcraft, regardless of the pre-existence of the Sabbat form. I do not simply refer here to the inspiring fantasies of Jules Michelet, but the important modern work of Silvia Federici. We see the same attacks on freedom of assembly in the destruction of the free festivals, rave culture and the occupy movement. These have been met by the masked Anonymous, the faceless black bloc anarchists, the direct actions of the ELF. These are expressions of popular witchcraft and have been persecuted by the same inquisition that came for us. I do not say that these are examples of operative witchcraft, I say that we, the people who are the Witchcraft, have a sacred duty to join this war. We need to celebrate Grand Sabbats again, infuse them with our witchblood, our cunning.

The scars are just something that happened to me. They aren't me. Not anymore.

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka. And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all.

These are burning times. And they call for Burning Women. Women embodied in their passion. Woman feeling in their bodies. Creative women. Courageous women. Women who have learned to run on a different power source to the world which is falling into flames around her. She has already disentangled herself from the wreckage of the patriarchal culture, so she will not be dazed, confused and disorientated by the systemic changes happening around her. Centred within herself, receptive to the Earth beyond her, she knows how to cultivate from the ashes, she knows how to find the embers to fuel the new fire. Burning Women arise. Our time is now. Our time has come.

These contradictions, of course, lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide. Yet, these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow. There are moments in the developed movement of capital which delay this movement other than by crises; such as e.g. the constant devaluation of a part of the existing capital: the transformation of a great part of capital into fixed capital which does not serve as agency of direct production; unproductive waste of a great portion of capital etc.

The secret to good health is to behave like your ancestors did before the Industrial Revolution.

These revolutions are born of hope, and their philosophies are formally optimistic.

The shouts of the villagers masked their own terror. Their screams were both a release and a sordid way of asking for grace, a baseness difficult to avoid in those troubled times.

The set of her chin suggested she might have slain a dragon before breakfast. The look in her eyes suggested she might, in fact, have eaten it.

These two, I thought, are no rebels; it is obvious that they have never been on the barricades of protesters and revolutionaries, they have never waved flags through the tear gas of a nation state. They have never charged with stones and sticks to break down the fences that protect the men in suits, the diggers of gold beneath the indigenous's soil, the oil thieves in boardrooms and the politicians behind citadel walls. The first rule of resistance is to keep you eyes open and protect your nose from the smell of defeat when the waft of power comes to separate you from your brothers-in-arms.

The revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin. We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.

the sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting stone of ideas-bhagat singh in court during his trial, india's struggle for freedom

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius - a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic." The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find; a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shaped should be." The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.