Governments are not overthrown by the poor, who have no power, but by the rich—when they are insulted by their inferiors and cannot obtain justice.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.

If there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.

Insurgents are like conquerors: they must go forward; the moment they are stopped, they are lost.

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

Revolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles. 

The peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms. 

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church; the third is the social revolution.

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and through rebellion.