Revolutionary Quotes - Page 39

• Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very nearly as slow in the uptake.

  Constant Lambert

  People, Lasts, Realizing

  "Music, Ho!". Book by Constant Lambert. "The Revolutionary Situation", p. 31, 1934.

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• There can be no doubt that if we had been victorious on the Vistula, the revolutionary fires would have reached the entire continent.

  Mikhail Tukhachevsky

  Fire, Doubt, Continents

  "A century's journey: how the great powers shape the world". Book by Robert A. Pastor, Stanley Hoffmann, p. 175, 1999.

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• The current model is global suicide. We need a revolution. Revolutionary thinking. Revolutionary action. Natural resources are becoming more and more scarce.

  Ban Ki-moon

  Suicide, Business, Thinking

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• There's no emotion more revolutionary than empathy.

  Gloria Steinem

  Empathy, Emotion

  "Why Gloria Steinem Says She And Jennifer Aniston Are In ‘Deep Sh*t’". MAKERS Conference Q&A, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 11, 2014.

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• Victor Serge died in exile and obscurity, apparently no more than a splinter of a splinter in the Marxist movement. But with the passage of the years, he looms up as one of the great moral figures of our time, an artist of such integrity and a revolutionary of such purity as to overshadow those who achieved fame and power. His failure was his success. I know of no participant in Russia's revolution and Spain's agonies who more deserves the attention of our concerned youth.

  I. F. Stone

  Integrity, Artist, Russia

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• However, the combination of civil resistance, of large-scale mass activities and strikes, with a certain degree of revolutionary violence, could provoke a crisis in the enemy's camp that would ultimately lead to essential changes.

  Joe Slovo

  Enemy, Resistance, Violence

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• Most conservatives - by which I mean normal people - have little conception of the aggressive and revolutionary force that confronts them. It is a revolutionary force in that it seeks to overturn the existing order, but it differs from the spirit of Marx and Lenin in that it never proclaims itself openly.

  Tom Bethell

  Mean, Order, People

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• The Black Panther party of Self-Defense is a revolutionary party.

  Bobby Seale

  Party, Self, Black

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• As for those deserters, malcontents, radicals, incendiaries, the civil and uncivil disobedients among the young, SDS, PLP, Weathermen I and Weathermen II, the revolutionary action movement, the Black United Front, Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, Lions and Tigers alike - I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  Zoos, Hippie, Black

  Spiro T. Agnew (1970). “The real Spiro Agnew: commonsense quotations of a household word”, Pelican Publishing Company

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• The people's community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy...Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must.

  Joseph Goebbels

  War, Hate, Class

  "Those Damned Nazis" by Joseph Goebbels, Mjölnir, 1932.

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• My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently. My painting contains in it the message of pain. I think that at least a few people are interested in it. It's not revolutionary. Why keep wishing for it to be belligerent? I can't. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.

  Frida Kahlo

  Children, Pain, Thinking

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• At times, I have been criticized by some philosophers of education, who place me in postures that they classify pejoratively as 'revolutionary.' But I have had the satisfaction of being invited to work in societies making progressive efforts without wavering. They were changing, and so they called on me.

  Paulo Freire

  Effort, Wavering, Satisfaction

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• The classic trap for any revolutionary is always, “What's your alternative?” But even if you could provide the interrogator with a blueprint, this does not mean he would use it: in most cases he is not sincere in wanting to know. In fact this is a common offensive, a technique to reflect revolutionary anger and turn it against itself. Moreover, the oppressed have no job to convince all people. All they need know is that the present system is destroying them.

  Shulamith Firestone

  Jobs, Mean, People

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• The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.

  Leon Trotsky

  Party, Differences, Desire

  Leon Trotsky (2008). “History of the Russian Revolution”, p.605, Haymarket Books

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• ...the emergent capabilities bursting forth from the revolutionary advances in the life sciences are about to make us the principal agent of evolution.

  Al Gore

  Agents, Evolution, Bursting

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• What makes revolutionary thought unique is its clarity and dignity, and its clear grasp of freedom and justice: simple, clear words that are understood without the need for any help from elite writers or thinkers.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Unique, Simple, Justice

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• Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.

  Whittaker Chambers

  Mind, Trotsky, Exile

  Whittaker Chambers (1964). “Cold Friday”, New York

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• If churches around the world would grasp the revolutionary truth that Christ's transforming power always comes through sacrifice and weakness, it would dramatically alter the landscape of the global church.

  Joni Eareckson Tada

  Sacrifice, Church, Weakness

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• To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often by a way of spinning one's wheels deeper in sand.

  Kate Millett

  Rebel, Way, Spinning

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• All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.

  Christina Stead

  Men, Class, Three

  Christina Stead (1936). “The beauties and furies”

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• The poet who speaks out of the deepest instincts of man will be heard. The poet who creates a myth beyond the power of man to realize is gagged at the peril of the group that binds him. He is the true revolutionary: he builds a new world.

  Babette Deutsch

  Men, Speaks Out, Poetry

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• I have decided to give up heterosexuality. I have decided that, while the project of altering the balance of power within heterosexual relationships is still a valid one, it is no longer one I can espouse--so to speak. There is no revolutionary hope for the heterosexual, and I have therefore decided to love myself and become a lesbian.

  Michelene Wandor

  Giving Up, Balance, Heterosexuality

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• ... in order to be a true revolutionary, you must understand love. Love, sacrifice, and death.

  Sonia Sanchez

  Love, Death, Sacrifice

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• The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

  Robert Darnton

  Mouths, American Revolution, Internet

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• As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

  Robert Darnton

  Book, Communication, Writing

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