Revolutionary Thinking Quotes & Sayings

If you think like others, how can you be sure you're thinking at all? — Daniel Delgado F.

I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people's rights to get married, join the Army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform. — Barney Frank

I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness. — Boris Pasternak

It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have threatened the idea of human centrality. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. Next, Darwin showed us that we were not central in the chain of life but, like all other creatures, had evolved from other life-forms. Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not masters in our own house-that much of our behavior is governed by forced outside of our consciousness. There is no doubt that Freud's unacknowledged co-revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud's birth, had posited that we are governed by deep biological forced and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities. — Irvin D. Yalom

I've noticed a lot of people talking about the wealth of roles for powerful women in television lately. And when I look around the room at the women here and I think about the performances that I've watched this year, what I see actually are women who are sometimes powerful and sometimes not. Sometimes sexy and sometimes not. Sometimes honourable and sometimes not. And what I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film. That's what I think is revolutionary and evolutionary and it's what turning me on. — Maggie Gyllenhaal

I'd say that I think the most revolutionary act that you can commit in our society today is to be happy. — Patch Adams

I Think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power , the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details. (1973 — Joseph Beuys

I think it's the right moment to talk about it because it is part of a revolutionary perspective - how can we not only discover more compassionate relations with human beings but how can we develop compassionate relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet and that would mean challenging the whole capitalist industrial form of food production. — Angela Davis

Those who applaud social production and networked amateurism, the colorful cacophony that is the Internet, and the creative capacities of everyday people to produce entertaining and enlightening things online, are right to marvel. There is amazing inventiveness, boundless talent and ability, and overwhelming generosity on display. Where they go wrong is thinking that the Internet is an egalitarian, let alone revolutionary, platform for our self-expression and development, that being able to shout into the digital torrent is adequate for democracy. — Astra Taylor

The reactionary of any kind condemns sexual pleasure because it stimulates and repulses him at the same time. He is unable to solve the conflict within him between sexual demands and moralistic inhibitions. The revolutionary refutes the perverse, unhealthy kind of pleasure, because it is not his kind of pleasure, because it is not the sexuality of the future, but the sexuality which results from the conflict between instinct and morals, the sexuality of authoritarian society, a debased, smutty, pathological sexuality. — Wilhelm Reich

What is in the minds of the majority the society is unmindful of. — Amit Abraham

I think that the greatest betrayal that a revolutionary can participate in is to become like the people you are struggling against. To become like your persecutors. I think that is a betrayal and a sin. — Assata Shakur

What I learned is, we have to listen to each other, even when we don't agree, even when we think we hate each other. We have to listen to each others narratives. Not interrupt defensively, or with hostility, but really try to open our hearts and listen with empathy. I learned so much from that meeting. It was a very difficult thing to do and it was one of the best things that I ever did in my life. Look what scares you in the face, and try to understand it. Empathy, I have learned, is revolutionary. — Jane Fonda

Study so that you are able to meet arguments of your opponents. Equip your ideology with supporting arguments. If you oppose a prevailing belief, if you criticize a great person who is considered to be an incarnation, you will find that your criticism will be answered by calling you vain and egoist. The reason for this is mental ignorance. Logic and free thinking are the twin qualities that a revolutionary must inevitably possess. To say that Mahatmas, who are great, should not be criticized because they are above criticism and for this reason, whatever they say about politics, religion, economics and ethics is correct and that whatever they say will have to be accepted, whether you believe it or not, reveals a mentality which cannot lead us to progress and is clearly regressive. — Bhagat Singh

The world will always need revolution. That doesn't mean shooting and violence. A revolution is when you change your thinking. Confucianism and Christianity were both revolutionary. — Jose Mujica

I think democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world ... .because if you have power you use it to meet the needs of you and your community. — Tony Benn

What I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film. That's what I think is revolutionary and evolutionary. — Maggie Gyllenhaal

Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in. — Douglas Adams

It is amazing how desperately the self-proclaimed revolutionaries grope for their own orthodoxy. — A.E. Samaan

I got the O.B.E because I represent England outside of England more ... but thinking of me as an actor, I haven't done all the classical theatre, all the great roles. Think of Helen Mirren and me. Helen, who I adore, is a friend - should be Dame. I am the rebel, the revolutionary on the side. — Charlotte Rampling

Certainly the revolutionary thinker must go beyond thought. He knows that almost all his best ideas come to him when thinking has stopped. He may have struggled and struggled to understand a problem in terms of old ways of thinking, only to find it impossible. But when thought stops from exhaustion, the mind is open to see the problem as it is - not as it is verbalized - and at once it is understood. — Alan W. Watts

My agent called and said, 'How do you feel about a pirate movie? I mean, how often are you going to get that call? It's sort of the singularly most failed genre of our time, but I thought it had to be attempted one more time. I think there's something rebellious about pirates, something revolutionary about them. They came out of a time when things were oppressive; you could get hung for stealing a loaf of bread. For me, the Pirates films are about when it's right to break the rules to achieve what you want. — Gore Verbinski

By believing your work is a 'gift,' it radically changes what you create. I think this is a revolutionary idea. It's no longer about client approval or a paycheck, but aspiring to make work that has meaning and purpose in your life and for your audience. — James Victore

Some liberation theologians maintain that they are not influenced by Marxist philosophy at all. In this case it is necessary to discern whether they say this for tactical reasons, so as not to be compromised politically or whether they are really convinced that Marxism doesn't influence them in any way. I personally think that it is not possible to evade the influence of Marxism, as we cannot commit ourselves to the revolutionary struggle without drawing support from the conclusions of scientific socialism. — Ernesto Cardenal

It is revolutionary in the history of human thinking to imagine that the world is not built with solid bricks, but rather with vibration, energy. — Massimo Citro

Merciless criticism and independent thinking are the two necessary traits of revolutionary thinking. — Bhagat Singh

The intellectual project of decolonizing has to set out ways to proceed through a colonizing world. It needs a radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities that can only be imagined as other things fall into place. Decolonizing Methodologies is not a method for revolution in a political sense but provokes some revolutionary thinking about the roles that knowledge, knowledge production, knowledge hierarchies and knowledge institutions play in decolonization and social transformation. — Zed Books

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Think different in order to change the rules. By definition, if you don't change the rules you aren't a revolutionary, and if you don't think different, you won't change the rules. — Guy Kawasaki

While twentieth-century physicists were not able to identify any convincing mathematical constants underlying the fine structure, partly because such thinking has normally not been encouraged, a revolutionary suggestion was recently made by the Czech physicist Raji Heyrovska, who deduced that the fine structure constant, ...really is defined by the [golden] ratio .... — Carl Johan Calleman

The character I play has all these revolutionary ideas. I think the classic thing is that majority people who are criticising it probably have never read the books, and need to. And I'm sure that the Catholic Church, which is being directed as you know, can handle it. — Daniel Craig

I do not think my painting has ever been revolutionary. It was not directed against any kind of painting. I have never wanted to prove that I was right and someone else wrong ... — Georges Braque

Valiant! The word mocked me, for I knew myself to be anything but valiant. What I had done, I had done in a fit of insane bitterness, not with cool courage, not with brave quick thinking, not with presence of mind - but with absence of it. — Kenneth Roberts

Over time I've learned, surprisingly, that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what's actually possible. It's why we've put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you'll usually get there. And even if you fail, you'll probably learn something important. It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future. — Eric Schmidt

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

Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx's seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology. — Carl Schmitt

When you do men's wear, it's less about thinking outside the box than about pushing the walls of the box outward. Men want to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. — John Varvatos

We don't go further than what Marx called the exchange value of the actual object- we don't think about the relations that that object embodies- and were important to the production of that object, whether it's our food or our clothes or our iPads or all the materials we use to acquire an education at an institution like this. That would really be revolutionary to develop a habit of imagining the human relations and non-human relations behind all of the objects that constitute our environment. — Angela Davis

I don't know if you've ever been to England, but as soon as they find out you're from America, they hate you. They just think they're more sophisticated than we are. They're so pissed at us. You know what it is? They're mad because they lost the Revolutionary War, and they should be because there was only like nine of us. — Jay Mohr

My experience to date has been that change, particularly relative to business, rarely happens in a revolutionary way. That isn't to say there are not times when major change happens, but my experience is that particularly when you're encouraging businesses to change of their own volition, the change is more slow over time. I don't think global trade is going to go away. I think it's unlikely that global trade and multinationals are not going to be around. — Jeffrey Hollender

I think the basis - the foundation - has already been laid for a society where people will work together and enjoy the wealth of the whole nation together. I think this will be accomplished because this is the theme of the revolutionary government's program. — Huey Newton

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

Do not allow yourself to imagine that revolutionary thinking can be propagated by governmental power. — Vinoba Bhave

What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary. — Frantz Fanon

We might possess every technological resource ... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative. — Adrienne Rich

The revolutionary thinking that God loves me as I am and not as I should be requires radical rethinking and profound emotional readjustment. Small wonder that the late spiritual giant Basil Hume of London, England, claimed that Christians find it easier to believe that God exists than that God loves them. — Brennan Manning

Without even thinking about it, I sent Callum an image of a dog hiking his leg at a fire hydrant. And then one of a rebel flag from the Revolutionary War.
Callum didn't respond in my head, but I knew he'd gotten the message, because he met me at the front door, and the first thing he said, with a single arch of his eyebrow, was, "Don't tread on you?"
"More like 'don't metaphorically pee on my brainwaves,' but it's the same sentiment, really."
"Vulgarity does not become you, Bryn."
"Are you going to lecture, or are we going to run?"
He sighed, but I didn't need a bond with the pack to see that he was thinking that I had always, always been a difficult child. And then, just in case that point wasn't clear, he verbalized it. "You have always, always been a difficult child."
I smiled sweetly. "I try. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

This is the war where we change. This is the trickster war. It's where we disappear, just like they desire us disappear. I spoke it you before: They wish us blank," he said, gesturing without thinking at Dr. Trefusis, who was the nearest exemplar of the white race. "They want us with no history and no memory. They want us empty as paper so they can write on us, so we ain't nothing but a price and an owner's name and a list of tasks. And that's what we'll give them. We'll give them your Nothing. We'll give them my William Williams and Henry Henry. We'll slip through and we'll change to who we must needs be and I will be all sly and have my delightful picaresque japes. But at the end of it, when it's over, I shall be one thing. I shall be one man, fixed, and not have to take no other name. I shall be one person steadily for some years."
"This is why we got to win ... If we ever wish to be one person, we got to win. — M T Anderson

I think there is a legitimate critique of reformism, as a politics that is content with making small changes in society without asking for bigger and deeper changes. And revolutionary reforms, meaning actions that we take in small ways to make the world a better place and disrupt some of the ways that capitalism is reproduced. — Cynthia Kauffman