Quotes & Sayings About Failed Revolutions

The Bolsheviks killed their own most loyal supporters at Kronstadt in 1921, because they failed to understand that the revolution no longer required revolutionaries, but obedient servants. — Peter Hitchens

Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goal that failed, it can enter, as a 'regulative idea,' the desperate struggle for changing the world. Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual. — Herbert Marcuse

We are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society. — Thomas Jefferson

Now since France has three times in sixty years failed to obtain practical results from Political revolutions, all Europe is apt to press forward into new Social doctrine to regulate the future. — Lajos Kossuth

Right. I'm sure that poor etiquette is the number one reason for most failed revolutions. — Marissa Meyer

The revolutions of my century, the 20th century - the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba - failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century. — Stephane Hessel

Terrorists have failed in what is arguably al Qaida's most important objective - to trigger revolutions. — Gijs De Vries

All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying
a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour. — Edward Abbey

Of all the major developments in the history of science, there may be no better example than that of the periodic system to argue against Thomas Kuhn's thesis that scientific progress occurs through a series of sharp revolutionary stages.20 Indeed, Kuhn's insistence on the centrality of revolutions in the development of science and his efforts to single out revolutionary contributors has probably unwittingly contributed to the retention of a Whiggish history of science, whereby only the heroes count while blind alleys and failed attempts are written out of the story.21 — Eric Scerri

Yet the point that JFK missed - and that almost everyone else has gone on to miss - is that much of this journalism was devoted to upholding and defending the ideas not of the coming Russian and Chinese or (as Kennedy failed to appreciate at the time) Cuban Revolutions, but of the earlier American one. — Christopher Hitchens