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Prudence ... will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, Declaration of Independence
The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world, you want to blow it up.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, Dirty Hands
A people contending for life and liberty are seldom disposed to look with a favorable eye upon either men or measures whose passions, interests or consequences will clash with those inestimable objects.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to General Thomas, Jul. 23, 1775
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny. They have only shifted it to another shoulder.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman
It's the well-behaved children ... that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don't say a word, they don't hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on they make society pay dearly.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, Dirty Hands
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to W.S. Smith, Nov. 13, 1787
Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
EDMUND BURKE, Reflections on the Revolution in France
That humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them.
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
JOHN BRADSHAW, inscription on his tombstone
Do people demand a really just system? Well, we'll arrange it so that they'll be satisfied with one that's a little less unjust ... They want a revolution, and we'll give them reforms -- lots of reforms; we'll drown them in reforms. Or rather, we'll drown them in promises of reforms, because we'll never give them real ones either!!
DARIO FO, Accidental Death of an Anarchist
If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to James Madison, Jan. 30, 1787
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
C.S. LEWIS, The World's Last Night
- They never fail who die
- In a great cause: the block may soak their gore:
- Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs
- Be strung to city gates and castle walls—
- But still their Spirit walks abroad. Though years
- Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,
- They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
- Which overpower all others, and conduct
- The world at last to Freedom.
LORD BYRON, Marino Faliero
Revolutions never go backwards.
WENDELL PHILLIPS, speech, Feb. 17, 1861
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