Quotes & Sayings About Revolutionary Leaders

The deficiency of the negro race is not as a result of the deluge number of bad leaders;rather, its is an outcome of the shortage of young negro intellect ready to lead a revolutionary africa. — Victor Adeagbo

Be the start of something that is good, revolutionary and powerful. Everything after that is a bonus! — Carlos Wallace

The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting - the war and the revolution - and the character of the accused - revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power - you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history. — Leon Trotsky

Jesus was not revolutionary because he said we should love God and each other. Moses said that first. So did Buddha, Confucius, and countless other religious leaders we've never heard of. Madonna, Oprah, Dr. Phil, the Dali Lama, and probably a lot of Christian leaders will tell us that the point of religion is to get us to love each other. "God loves you" doesn't stir the world's opposition. However, start talking about God's absolute authority, holiness, ... Christ's substitutionary atonement, justification apart from works, the necessity of new birth, repentance, baptism, Communion, and the future judgment, and the mood in the room changes considerably. — Michael S. Horton

To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders. — Paulo Freire

The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures. — Paulo Freire

New leaders must also expect and manage setbacks. In post-revolutionary times, expectations are high, and the obstacles to meeting them are enormous. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

Leaders #1 job is to help their people, teams, leadership, and culture, to be #FutureFit...by supporting People, Planet & Profits, in a Consciously Constructive Revolutionary Workplace... today. — Tony Dovale

Revolutionary tactics cannot be invented by leaders; they must develop spontaneously-history comes first, leaders' consciousness second. — Rosa Luxemburg

No story shows more clearly Jesus' utter disregard of human privilege - disregard, not antipathy or distaste. He is swayed neither by Jairus's prominence nor by the woman's poverty, but by the faith and desperate need of each one. Jesus is not a strategic political calculator, currying favor with the local leaders; nor is he a revolutionary, ostentatiously undercutting the powerful. He is a restorer of daughters, known and unknown, socially central and socially marginal. And while he is indifferent to human power, he is so exquisitely aware of his own power to restore health (which is simply another way to say flourishing image bearing) that the slightest faithful brush with his cloak brings him to a halt, not content to have power flow anonymously and disconnectedly, searching out relationship with the ones who seek him. — Andy Crouch

Realization of this need means adults must awaken to the urgency of the young people's unrest-in other words there must be created an adult unrest against the inequities and injustices in the present system. If the government is in jeopardy, it is not because we are unable to cope with revolutionary situations. Jeopardy means that either the leaders or the people do not realize they have all the tools required to make the revolution come true. The tools and the opportunity exist. Only the moral imagination is missing. — William O. Douglas

Christianity is an extreme call to a radical life following a revolutionary leader. — Steve Saint

The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation - all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate, by the Constitution of the United States, drafted at a convention of Revolutionary leaders in Philadelphia. — Howard Zinn

Revolution is not 'showing' life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation. — Guy Debord

The reason most of your staff are asleep and disengaged, is because you have boring, and bully managers, and no REAL Leaders to inspire and unleash potential. — Tony Dovale

Peter the Great was probably the equal, in dedication, power and ruthlessness, of many of the most successful revolutionary or nationalist leaders. Yet he failed in his chief purpose, which was to turn Russia into a Western nation. And the reason he failed was that he did not infuse the Russian masses with some soul-stirring enthusiasm. He either did not think it necessary or did not know how to make of his purpose a holy cause. It is not strange that the Bolshevik revolutionaries who wiped out the last of the Czars and Romanovs should have a sense of kinship with Peter - a Czar and a Romanov. For his purpose is now theirs, and they hope to succeed where he failed. The Bolshevik revolution may figure in history as much an attempt to modernize a sixth of the world's surface as an attempt to build a Communist economy. The — Eric Hoffer

I believe the United States government is being
systematically taken over by a revolutionary network. They call themselves
Progressives, but we know they are really leftist radicals,
dedicated to the demise of the free-market capitalist system. They have
co-opted and bought off leaders of both the Republican and Democratic
parties, established a dominant role in all three branches of
government and thoroughly co-opted the mainstream media. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

I believe that the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918 when plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads. All evidence indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of day and admitting the right of defence, would have attained the same efficiency with far less abuse and depravity. Was it necessary to revert to the procedures of the Inquisition? — Victor Serge

The last thing I want to tell you is this: in a real revolution - not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions - in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment - often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured - that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. But enough of that. My meaning is that I don't want you to be a victim. — Joseph Conrad

Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation. — Barack Obama

To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders. — Victor Hugo

History repeats itself. As do the methods used by those specializing in the elimination of leaders who unite people into a strong force for dignity, justice and self-determination. — S.M. Sigerson

Of all the potential perils to the new American republic, the prospect of concentrated power ... troubled the intellectual leaders of the Revolutionary generation. Familiar as the founders were with old Europe ... they understood why the accumulation of inherited wealth led to inequities and imbalances that inevitably corrupted any system of government. — Joe Conason

Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervor destroyed by mass media. They become Hollywood objects and lose identification with the real issues. The task is to transform society; only the people can do that — Huey Newton

We are attempting to build, within our movement, non-exploitative ways of relating to one another based on trust and concern rather than political expediency. We have serious personal/political intentions in breaking down hierarchical and elitist structures, and for experimenting with leaderless groups and collective decision making. In dealing with the media these revolutionary principles and practices are destroyed. The media works to create leaders, it knows no way of relating to us on our own terms. Being interviewed and presented as a leader is a real ego trip
the media brings out the most counter-revolutionary traits in people. Elitism, dissension and division are the ultimate results. — Nancy Ferro

I've always thought the pre-Revolutionary system was more elegant, but it did concentrate too much power in the hands of one person. Keyes says that at least you knew who the man was then. The person who represents a Lobby in Congress is never the one who makes the real decisions; the real leaders are rarely identifiable and are never held responsible for their actions. If a puppet gets in trouble they sacrifice him and haul out another. I don't doubt that that's true, at least some of the time, but it's certainly not the whole story. If a Lobby consistently acts against the public interest, its voting power dwindles away. Keyes says that's a cynical illusion: all the polls reflect is how much money a Lobby has put into advertising. — Joe Haldeman

Appreciation and recognition are qualities that most leaders forget, but desperately need, to build a positive, passionate and engaged workplace. — Tony Dovale

The leaders of the Pahlavi regime, in an attempt to forestall the rising tide of the Islamic revolutionary movement, were hard at work to cast doubt on the question of the Imam Khomeini's position as a Marja'a (a top religious authority) and in this way, undermine public faith in his academic, political and religious competence. — Yousef Saanei

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

The troblemakers in Hungary are the Jews ... they demoralize our country and they are the leaders of the revolutionary gang that is torturing Hungary. — Jozsef Mindszenty

Communist leaders ask humanity to endure the conflagration of revolutionary violence, the suppression and liquidation of resistance groups, the expropriation of property, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat which they themselves describe as "based on force and unrestricted by any laws," the suspension of all civil liberties - suppression of free press, free speech and assembly, the existence of slave labor camps, the constant observation of all citizens by secret police, the long periods of service — W. Cleon Skousen

The Communist Manifesto condemned the bourgeoisie not only for pauperizing, dehumanizing, and enslaving the toiling masses, but also for robbing the intellectual of his elevated status. "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe." Though the movement was initiated by intellectuals and powered by their talents and hungers, it yet held up the proletariat as the chosen people - the only carrier of the revolutionary idea, and the chief beneficiary of the revolution to come. The intellectuals, particularly those who had "raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole," were to act as guides - as a composite Moses - during the long wanderings in the desert. Like Moses, the intellectuals would have no more to do once the promised land was in sight. "The role of the intelligentsia," said Lenin, "is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary. — Eric Hoffer

You must see yourself as guardian, somebody who will preserve what is true and pass it on. Be a guardian. We don't need militants or revolutionaries. We need guardians. We need leaders. — Beck

Revolutionary leaders have to care more about what they think of themselves than what the world thinks of them. — Guy Kawasaki