Motivational Quotes

Evolution

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

- Fox, Charles James

Best Quotes about Evolution

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

Aristotle

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement -- but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

Conrad, Joseph

The question is this -- Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new fanged theories.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

Russell, Bertrand

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Twain, Mark

Whether a revolutions succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.

Heine, Heinrich

One revolution is like one cocktail, it just gets you organized for the next.

Rogers, Will

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is -- a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

Spencer, Herbert

10.

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

Camus, Albert

11.

The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.

Conklin, Edward

12.

The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.

Guizot, Francois (Pierre Guillaume)

13.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Vaneigem, Raoul

14.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

King Jr. Martin Luther

15.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

16.

To be a revolutionary you have to be human being. You have to care about people who have no power.

Fonda, Jane

17.

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.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

18.

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Zedong, Mao

19.

In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interest are at stake.

Aristotle

20.

Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world...life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere.

Chardin, Pierre Teilhard De

21.

On the first day of a revolution he is a treasure; on the second he ought to be shot.

22.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

Hoffer, Eric

23.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Lorenz, Konrad

24.

A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

Revolutions are notorious for allowing even non-participants -- even women! -- new scope for telling the truth since they are themselves such massive moments of truth, moments of such massive participation.

James, Selma

26.

Every revolutionary ends up by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.

Camus, Albert

27.

We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.

Herzen, Alexander

28.

The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.

Hoffer, Eric

29.

The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.

King Jr. Martin Luther

30.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

31.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

Fox, Charles James

32.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

33.

True revolutionaries are like God -- they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti

34.

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

35.

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

Guin, Ursula K. Le

36.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Tuchman, Barbara

37.

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

Wald, George

38.

So they united, and the Communist revolution took the chain from their legs and wound it around their necks.

Bonom, Samuel

39.

If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

40.

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

Hugo, Victor

41.

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts -- it's what you do with what you have left.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

42.

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.

Russell, Bertrand

43.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

Twain, Mark

44.

A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.

Castro, Fidel

45.

Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.

Baudrillard, Jean

46.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

Rich, Adrienne

47.

The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces -- in nature, in society, in man himself.

Trotsky, Leon

48.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed -- that is the meaning of evolution.

Greene, Graham

49.

It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.

Ellis, Havelock

50.

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

Desmoulins, Camille