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.
—Frantz Fanon, 1961Quotes
And then, sir, there is this consideration: that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up and, claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.
—Samuel Johnson, 1791All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
—Havelock Ellis, 1921Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.
—Pierre Boulez, 1989Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power.
—Leo Tolstoy, 1893Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
—John F. Kennedy, 1962Governments 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.
—Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BCDisobedience, 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.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891The only justification of rebellion is success.
—Thomas B. Reed, 1878Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1861Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871