Quotes
Quotes about Revolution
Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.â1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.
To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.
We are now in the third stage of the industrial revolution. The first involved machines which extended human muscle; the second used machines to extend the human nervous system (radio, television, telephones); the third is now utilizing machines which extend the human mind-computers. About half of all service workers (43 percent of the labor force by 2000) will be involved in collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, structuring, storing, or retrieving information... By 1995, 80 percent of all management will be "knowledge workers.".
I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.
The Revolution has not yet succeeded. Comrades, you must carry on!
Promise yourself to live your life as a revolution and not just a process of evolution. -Anthony J. D'Angelo.
Martyrs are needed to create incidents. Incidents are needed to create revolutions. Revolutions are needed to create progress.
Revolutions never occur in mathematics.
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
We are the men of intrinsic value, who can strike our fortunes out of ourselves, whose worth is independent of accidents in life, or revolutions in government: we have heads to get money, and hearts to spend it.
When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forwardâor go back. He who now talks about the "freedom of the press" goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.
CONSIDERING THE VOID When I behold the charm of evening skies, their lulling endurance; the patterns of stars with names of bears and dogs, a swan, a virgin; other planets that the Voyager showed were like and so unlike our own, with all their diverse moons, bright discs, weird rings, and cratered faces; comets with their streaming tails bent by pressure from our sun; the skyscape of our Milky Way holding in its shimmering disc an infinity of suns (or say a thousand billion); knowing there are holes of darkness gulping mass and even light, knowing that this galaxy of ours is one of multitudes in what we call the heavens, it troubles me. It troubles me. -President Jimmy Carter- (he has written a volume of poetry as well as a novel, The Hornet's Nest, about the Revolutionary War).
England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.
The most heroic word in all languages is revolution.
It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man.
By the end, everybody had a labelâpig, liberal, radical, revolutionary ... If you had everything but a gun, you were a radical but not a revolutionary.
One of the peculiarities of the American Revolution was that its leaders pinned their hopes on the organization of decision-making units, the structuring of their incentives, and the counterbalancing of the units against one another, rather than on the more usual (and more exciting) principle of substituting "the good guys" for "the bad guys.".
For the sake of domestic peace, liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary it is the very means of preventing revolution and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
All revolutions...have been led by persons who knew oppression well, but not on their own skin.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violen trevolution inevitable.
To illustrate the difference between the innovator and the dull crowd of routinists who cannot even imagine that any improvement is possible, we need only refer to a passage in Engel's most famous book. Here, in 1878, Engels apodictically announced that military weapons are "now so perfected that no further progress of any revolutionizing influence is any longer possible." Henceforth "all further [technological] progress is by and large indifferent for land warfare. The age of evolution is in this regard essentially closed." This complacent conclusion shows in what the achievement of the innovator consists: he accomplishes what other people believe to be unthinkable and unfeasible.
The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books- they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.
Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.
Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
