Political Revolutions Quotes & Sayings

As with most revolutions, the counterculture's call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control. The phenomenon of 'political correctness', with its speech codes and other efforts to enforce ideological conformity, was one predictable result of this transformation. What began at the University of California at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement (called by some the 'Filthy Speech Movement'} soon degenerated into an effort to abridge freedom by dictating what could and could not be said about any number of politically sensitive issues. — Roger Kimball

It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organize something, to institutionalize this or that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for 6,000 years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again. — Albert J. Nock

This example illustrates the differences in the effects which may be produced by research in pure or applied science. A research on the lines of applied science would doubtless have led to improvement and development of the older methods-the research in pure science has given us an entirely new and much more powerful method. In fact, research in applied science leads to reforms, research in pure science leads to revolutions, and revolutions, whether political or industrial, are exceedingly profitable things if you are on the winning side. — Joseph John Thomson

In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for" ... On the whole throughout this period the man
or party
that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration. — Peter Drucker

All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions. — John Stuart Mill

Permanent mass unemployment destroys the moral foundations of the social order. The young people, who, having finished their training for work, are forced to remain idle, are the ferment out of which the most radical political movements are formed. In their ranks the soldiers of the coming revolutions are recruited. — Ludwig Von Mises

I'm guessing that musicals didn't make sense anymore because of the changes in the political environment that began in the late Sixties, an era of self-awareness and social revolutions. — Carmen Ejogo

There is little doubt that we are in the midst of a revolution of a much more profound and fundamental nature than the social and political revolutions of the last half century. — Arthur Erickson

this integration of Jefferson and Jesus is in many ways how members of the evangelical right can oppose abortion yet ignore the needs of disenfranchised members of society, how they can rage against sexual revolutions and offer little critique on economic greed or mass consumption, and how they can keep labor unions and government in check while not doing the same to Wall Street, insurance companies, and other big American businesses. Of course, much of today's evangelical political doctrine has become so radical, so driven by fear and hyperbole that it's more or less a parody of the doctrines of Thomas Jefferson and Jesus, a culture where the poor in spirit are not blessed, they are marginalized and expected to care for themselves. — Matthew Paul Turner

Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise for them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds. — Isaac Asimov

By this definition we are in the middle of a revolution: something wider than a pure political overthrow and narrower than the classic social revolutions of the twentieth century. Out of the very values and practices of free-market capitalism - individualism, choice, respect for human rights, the network, the flattened hierarchy - the masses have developed a new collective practice. They can bypass and supersede the machinery of power via, as Gorz predicted, an 'alternative network of relations'. — Paul Mason

On the political Right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political Left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the twenty-first century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state. — Timothy Snyder

I am against revolution and am proud of it. Democracy cannot be created through revolutions. The most important dichotomy that I make for a society is between those who support democracy and human rights, and those who oppose it. In a totalitarian state, the state views any act of an individual to be political in nature. For example, the clothing that a person wears in a modern state is a private affair whereas in the Islamic Republic all women are forced to wear the hijab (Islamic attire). When women push their headscarf back an inch or two, this is interpreted to be a political act, — Akbar Ganji

The old terms must be invented with new meaning and given new explanations. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are no longer what they were in the days of the late-lamented guillotine. This is what the politicians will not understand; and that is why I hate them. They want only their own special revolutions- external revolutions, political revolutions, etc. But that is only dabbling. What is really needed is a revolution of the human spirit. — Henrik Ibsen

Humanity has experienced many revolutionary changes over the course of history: revolutions in agriculture, in science, industrial production, as well as numerous political revolutions. But these have all been limited to the external aspects of our individual and collective lives. — Daisaku Ikeda

Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all — Thomas Kuhn

I am fully aware of the concept of political revolutions. After all, that is what we hoped might happen in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, but what actually happened was capitalist restoration. — Tariq Ali

Fashion is not just about trends. It's about political history. You can trace it from the ancient Romans to probably until the '80s, and you can see defining moments that were due either to revolutions or changes in politics. — Daphne Guinness

Political judgments are generally vain formalities, for the same passions which give rise to the accusation ordain the condemnation. Such is the atrocious logic of revolutions. — Alexandre Dumas

I'm fully aware of the intense political pressures bearing down on education. The policies through which these pressures exert themselves must be challenged and changed. Part of my appeal (as it were) is to policymakers themselves to embrace the need for radical change. But revolutions don't wait for legislation. They emerge from what people do at the ground level. Education doesn't happen in the committee rooms of the legislatures or in the rhetoric of politicians. It's what goes on between learners and teachers in actual schools. If you're a teacher, for your students you are the system. If you're a school principal, for your community you are the system. If you're a policymaker, for the schools you control you are the system. — Ken Robinson

Music is more powerful than reason in the soul. That is also why Plato made music the very first step in his long educational curriculum: good music was to create the harmony of soul that would be a ripe field for the higher harmony of reason to take root in later. And that is also why he said that the decay of the ideal state would begin with a decay in music. In fact, one of your obscure modern scholars has shown that social and political revolutions have usually been preceded by musical revolutions, and why another sage said, 'Let me write the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws. — Peter Kreeft

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise. — Ludwig Von Mises

Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficientaccuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend. — Henry David Thoreau

Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both?

One aspect of the parallelism must already be apparent. Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. In both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution. — Thomas S. Kuhn

And lastly, the political revolutions from 1911 to the present time have done more to bring about tremendous social changes everywhere than even the economic and industrial changes and the new schools. — Hu Shih

It has been long considered possible to explain the more ancient revolutions on ... the Earth surface by means of these still existing causes; in the same manner as it is found easy to explain past events in political history, by an acquaintance with the passions and intrigues of the present day. But we shall presently see that unfortunately this is not the case in physical history:-the thread of operation is here broken, the march of nature is changed, and none of the agents that she now employs were sufficient for the production of her ancient works. — Georges Cuvier

Although the Civil War was an apocalyptic success in the sense that it brought an end to nearly a century of struggle and broken hopes regarding the ultimate extinction of African American slavery, it also combined new freedoms, as in other major revolutions, with shock, breakdown, trauma, and tragedy. Neither desired nor accurately anticipated by leaders in the North and South, the war dramatized the failure of the whole American system of political negotiation and compromise that had never weakened the institution of slavery but had supported democratic government for whites for over eighty years. < ... > Moreover, the long-term outcome of this revolutionary decision would be determined within a context of sectional hate and bitterness, political revenge, and competing presssures for reconciliation, reunion, and forgiveness. — David Brion Davis

Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power. — Mao Zedong

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

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. — Pierre Boulez

Paine knew that class tensions existed. He understood that revolutions stirred up resentments. In Common Sense, he adopted an ominous tone at a key point in his argument, warning readers that the time was ripe to declare independence and form a stable government. Or else. In the current state of things, "the mind of the multitude is left at random," he wrote, and "the property of no man is secure." Therefore, if the leadership class did not seize hold of the narrative, the broad appeal to political independence would be supplanted by an incendiary call for social leveling. — Nancy Isenberg

But science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation. — Arthur Balfour

The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson's idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical one. — Tim Wu

It advances Democracy": As it was throughout the Cold War, the response here should be "Democracy for whom?" "Democracy" has never been a univocal concept; and as a word, it has surely by now been degraded by so many reactionary projects, such as U.S. imperialism itself and the various middle class comprador movements that have furthered its purposes through coups and color revolutions. It is not the nominal political form aspired to, but the social goods that are being sought, that should weigh our evaluations of those who use such rhetoric. — Anonymous

Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying. — Steven Johnson

If every man and woman were to take the meaning of their life and pursue it passionately, they would alter the social landscape overnight. In fact, that's how lasting revolutions are made- not by the raised arm of the masses, not by the military seizure of power, not by the political coup d'etat, but by individuals asserting who they are one at a time. — Richard Bode

If debates about beauty in nineteenth-century
France were fierce, that was because beauty was seen to matter. This
was a world of political revolutions, of social reformism, of belief in
progress and human perfectibility. Why was it that beauty mattered so
much in such a world?. — Elizabeth Prettejohn

Woolf thought hard and continuously about the gravity, the scale, and the impact of these changes, and about the need for new literary forms to confront and interpret them. She was in the vanguard of a new generation of novelists for whom the traditional conventions of the novel no longer served to represent modern realities: the crumbling of established social and political orders, the sexual disquiet and jagged nerves, the moral revolt and cultural revolutions, the agitation for rights long denied, freedom unreasonably curbed or stupidly repressed. — Virginia Woolf

I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. — Isabel Wilkerson

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning. — Hannah Arendt

Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together, — Carl Sagan

The fall of Trantor," said Seldon, "cannot be stopped by any conceivable effort. It can be hastened easily, however. The tale of my interrupted trial will spread through the Galaxy. Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise to them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds. Have me killed and Trantor will fall not within three centuries but within fifty years and you, yourself, within a single year. — Isaac Asimov