100 Quotes About Revolution

Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life. Bob Marley

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. Jim Morrison

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take. Emma Goldman

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. Adam Smith

A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel. Unknown

But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove. Unknown

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism. Vladimir Lenin

The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden. Aysha Taryam

The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood. Frantz Fanon

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language." I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever. Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking. . Audre Lorde

Let us be today’s Christians. Let us not take fright at the boldness of today’s church. With Christ’s light let us illuminate even the most hideous caverns of the human person: torture, jail, plunder, want, chronic illness. The oppressed must be saved, not with a revolutionary salvation, in mere human fashion, but with the holy revolution of the Son of Man, who dies on the cross to cleanse God’s image, which is soiled in today’s humanity, a humanity so enslaved, so selfish, so sinful. . Oscar A. Romero

In that moment, I understand the way that the noblest yearning for duty and sacrifice can be mixed up with all that is savage and shameful, like in the Bible, where a just and merciful God tells you to kill everyone, kill the children, kill the livestock, kill John Polling, leave nothing alive to sully this pure and just world. Except when it's all done you find out that wasn't really God after all, just some politician, or maybe it was God, but he taps you on the shoulder and says, 'No, dude, that isn't what I meant, ' and leaves you sitting in a Dairy Queen in Bothell with blood on your hands and no further orders.. Stuart Archer Cohen

Question everything–no matter how beloved, or how long-held, or how exalted–without apology. Only those who build their world upon lies need fear an inquisitive mind. The truth will remain, even after a storm of doubt and revolution has washed over it. Only illusions need be protected. The truth need not be defended; it existed before us and will continue to exist after us. L.M. Browning

Those who had fought for what they called the revolution maintained a great pride: the pride of being on the correct side of the front lines. Ten or twelve years later (around the time of our story) the front lines began to melt away, and with them the correct side. No wonder the former supporters of the revolution feel cheated and are quick to seek substitute fronts; thanks to religion they can (in their role as atheists struggling against believers) stand again on the correct side and retain their habitual and precious sense of their own superiority. But to tell the truth, the substitute front was also useful to others, and it will perhaps not be too premature to disclose that Alice was one of them. Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her papa's shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe in God. Milan Kundera

It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt. But on an occasion such as this it was different, for the spirit of convention was being rigorously adhered to, and in between his ribs Mr. Flay experienced twinges of pleasure. Mervyn Peake

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. Arundhati Roy

They want us to be afraid. They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes. They want us to barricade our doors and hide our children. Their aim is to make us fear life itself! They want us to hate. They want us to hate 'the other'. They want us to practice aggression and perfect antagonism. Their aim is to divide us all! They want us to be inhuman. They want us to throw out our kindness. They want us to bury our love and burn our hope. Their aim is to take all our light! They think their bricked walls will separate us. They think their damned bombs will defeat us. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that my soul and your soul are old friends. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that when they cut you I bleed. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that we will never be afraid, we will never hate and we will never be silent for life is ours! . Kamand Kojouri

But in the midst of this decaying, burning city, there are pockets of hope. It can be found in the tiny dark rooms in underground bars, where women with short hair cheer on men in dresses. It can be felt in abandoned cinemas where anonymous strangers fall in love if only for a few moments, and in the living rooms where families crowd around, drinking sweet black tea and Skyping their homesick relatives so that together they can watch the long, rambling talk shows that go on all night. Saleem Haddad

People of Panem, we fight, we dare, we end our hunger for justice! ” There‘s dead silence on the set. It goes on. And on. Finally, the intercom crackles and Haymitch‘s acerbic laugh fills the studio. He contains himself just long enough to say, “And that, my friends, is how a revolution dies. Suzanne Collins

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. . Alain De Botton

Passando fra gli insorti che si scostavano con religioso rispetto, [papà Mabeuf] continuò dritto verso Enjolras che indietreggiava impietrito, gli strappò la bandiera, e senza che nessuno osasse trattenerlo né aiutarlo, quel vecchio ottuagenario col capo vacillante, ma col piede fermo, salì lentamente la scala di pietre costruita nella barricata. Lo spettacolo era così serio che tutto all'intorno dissero: «Giù il cappello! ». A ogni gradino che saliva diventava sempre più terribile: i suoi capelli canuti, il volto decrepito, l'ampia fronte calma e rugosa, gli occhi incavati, la bocca attonita e semiaperta, il vecchio braccio che sosteneva la bandiera rossa, uscivano dall'ombra e ingigantivano nel sanguinoso chiarore della torcia, e sembrava di vedere lo spettro del 1793 sorgere dalla terra inalberando la bandiera del terrore. Quando fu all'ultimo gradino, quando quel fantasma tremante e terribile, ritto su quel mucchio di rovine dinanzi a milleduecento fucili invisibili, si drizzò in faccia alla morte come se fosse più forte di essa, tutta la barricata assunse nelle tenebre un aspetto colossale e soprannaturale. Vi fu uno di quegli istanti di silenzio che accompagnano i prodigi. In mezzo a quel silenzio il vegliardo sventolò la bandiera rossa e gridò:« Viva la Rivoluzione! Viva la Repubblica! Fratellanza! Uguaglianza! E morte! ». Victor Hugo

But I don't shut up and I don't die. I liveand fight, maddeningthose who rule my country. For if I live I fight, and if I fight I contribute to the dawn. Unknown

The new world is as yetbehind the veil of destiny In my eyes, howeverits dawn has been unveiled Muhammad Iqbal

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin. JeanPaul Sartre

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries. Unknown

When a man finds this kind of woman, he will go all out for her knowing that she will not be a letdown. Jaachynma N.E. Agu

Don't die without fulfilling your purpose. Jaachynma N.E. Agu

Your words are powerful so what you say goes a long way to either establish or destroy you; this is why you should say things that God has said concerning you, not things that situations or circumstances say. Jaachynma N.E. Agu

Weigh whatever you are about to say; what will it do to your hearer - encouragement, edification, disappointment or fear? What will it do to your life - glorify, edify, beautify or weigh you down? Speak well and things will go well. Jaachynma N.E. Agu

You may not attain the highest height with one leap but my dear you will reach your destination. Jaachynma N.E. Agu

What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows. . George Orwell

Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit. Philip Pullman

You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight. Ernest Hemingway