"The most heroic word in all languages is revolution."
- Eugene Debs
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"I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on
the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and
intolerable conditions against which to revolute."
- Mark Twain, quoted in New York Sun, Tribune, World, 1906 (in defense of Maxim Gorki)
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"No people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being
immutable law that all revolution that will succeed must be in blood, whatever may answer afterward."
- Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they
shall grow weary of the existing government, they can excercise their constitutional right
of amending it, or excercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."
- Abraham Lincoln
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"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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"By the end, everybody had a label -- pig, liberal, radical, revolutionary ... If you had everything but a gun, you were a radical but not a revolutionary."
- Jerry Rubin
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"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
- Thomas Paine
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"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and is as neccessary in the
political world as storms in the physical."
- Thomas Jefferson
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"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that
its people preserve the spirit of resistance?"
- Thomas Jefferson
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"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."
- Abraham Lincoln
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"You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth."
- Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, 1882
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"We used to thing that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the
ground for revolution."
- Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time, 1967
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"It is the quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones."
- Abraham Lincoln, speech, January 12, 1848
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"All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the State."
- Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1951
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"Revolution or dictatorship can sometimes abolish bad things, but they can never create good or lasting ones. Impatience
is fatal in politics."
- Thomas Masaryk, The Foundations of Marxist Theory, 1899
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"A successful revolution establishes a new community. A missed revolution makes irreverent the community that persists.
And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute."
- Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd, 1960
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"Every successful revolt is termed a revolution, and every unsuccessful one a rebellion."
- Joseph Priestly, letter, 1791
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"The seed of revolution is repression."
- Woodrow Wilson, message to Congress, December 2, 1919
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"There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the route of the wineshop and
the church; the third is by that of social revolution."
- Michael Bakunin, God and the State, 1882
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"Better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait till it begins to abolish itself from below."
- Alexander II, speech, March 30, 1856
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"Armed insurrection stands in the same relation to revolution as revolution as a whole does to evolution."
- Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, 1933
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"When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression."
- Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1885
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"Not actual suffering but the hope of better things incites people to revolt."
- Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change, 1964
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"Beginning reform is beginning revolution."
- Arthur Wellesley, letter, November 7, 1830
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"It takes a revolution to make a solution."
- Bob Marley, in To the Point International, September 12, 1977
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"To be a revolutionary is to love your life enough to change it, to choose struggle instead of exile, to risk everything
with only a glimmering hope of a world to win."
- Andrew Kopkind, in New York Times Magazine, November 10, 1968
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"Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert
ideas."
- Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education, 1929
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"The tree of liberty only grows when watered by the blood of tyrants."
- Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac, speech, January 16, 1793
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"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dared to
dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, May 31, 1954
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell
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"The Party seeks power entirely for its for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested
solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will
understand presently. We are different from all oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others,
even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very
close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their motives. They pretended, perhaps they even
believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and just round the corner there lay a paradise
where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that, We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention
of relinquishing it. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in
order to establish a dictatorship."
- George Orwell, 1984
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"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
– Henry David Thoreau
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"The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms
or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to
permit uprising."
– Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japanese Shogun, August 29, 1558
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"Resistance to tyranny is service to God."
– James Madison
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" … the next revolution … will be when those who work refuse to support those who don't."
– Walter Hickel
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"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government,
and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right – a right which we hope and believe
is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may
choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the
territory as they inhabit."
– Abraham Lincoln, January 12, 1848 speech in Congress
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