top of page
Revolution Quotes


"The Sandinista revolution was without any question a popular insurrection."



"The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible."


"There was no reason for a revolution in Paraguay."


"A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution."



"The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards."


"A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets."


"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."


"The most heroic word in all languages is revolution."


"I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'"


"If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the Revolution."


"Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary."


"You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying."


"There has been hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905, without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers participated in a rather important way."


"Restoring the Welsh language in Wales is nothing less than a revolution. It is only through revolutionary means that we can succeed."


"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."


"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."


"The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world."


"Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved."



"I remember those great days when we were at $176 million before the Reagan Revolution came to town."


"You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution."


"The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man."


"The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing."


"Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also entails uncertainty, exhausting activity and upheaval of settled habits.Youth is substantially better off: it is not burdened by guilt, and the revolution can accept young people in toto. The uncertainty of revolutionary times is an advantage for youth, because it is the world of the fathers that is challenged. How exciting to enter into the age of maturity over the shattered ramparts of the adult world!"


"Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real."


"Revolutions are not about trifles but spring from trifles."


"A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal."


"There will be no prison which can hold our movement down."



"Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass."


"Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering."


"The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism."


"I would have the Constitution torn in shreds and scattered to the four winds of heaven. Let us destroy the Constitution and build on its ruins the temple of liberty. I have brothers in slavery. I have seen chains placed on their limbs and beheld them captive."


"So long as you do not know how to die it is useless for you to learn how to kill. India will not be benefited by brutal force. If India is to be benefited it will be through non-violence."


"We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it."



"The greatest and most powerful revolutions often start very quietly, hidden in the shadows. Remember that."


"Great change doesn't come with official endorsement."


"Think what a revolution it will be if we manage to get everyone to pay their taxes."


"The Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!"


"Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull."


"The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions."


"The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past."


"Above all, what socialist, without flushing with shame, maintains he is not a revolutionary? We say: none!."


"I promote revolution against the Capitalists and the Social Marxists."


"Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat."



"A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation."


"The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution."
bottom of page