Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944Quotes
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1776The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
—Germaine Greer, 1970The 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, 1961Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.
—Italo Calvino, 1957No one makes a revolution by himself, and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.
—George Sand, 1851Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Who draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard.
—James Howell, 1659I began revolution with eighty-two men. If I had to do it again, I do it with ten or fifteen and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.
—Fidel Castro, 1959
This 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, 1861Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man, not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
—Jean Genet, 1983All revolutions devour their own children.
—Ernst Röhm, 1933