Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

Greene, Graham

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Walker, Alice

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

Tuchman, Barbara

In a revolution, as in a novel. the most difficult part to invent is the end.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.

Nkrumah, Kwame

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

Orwell, George

No 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.

Sand, George

10.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

King Jr. Martin Luther

11.

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

12.

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

Camus, Albert

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

Hoffer, Eric

17.

He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favorable hearers.

Hooker, Richard

18.

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren't started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better -- and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

19.

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

20.

Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.

Lewis, Wyndham

21.

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

22.

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

Peirce, Charles Sanders

23.

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

Genet, Jean

24.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Trotsky, Leon

25.

A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

26.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose, but their chains. .Workers of the world unite!

Marx, Karl

27.

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

Camus, Albert

28.

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

29.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

30.

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara

31.

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

Diderot, Denis

32.

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

33.

A nation grown free in a single day is a child born with the limbs and the vigor of a man, who would take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a blaze that he might chuckle over the splendor.

Smith, Sydney

34.

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag, wash it.

Thomas, Norman

35.

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

36.

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it.

Inge, Dean William R.

37.

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

38.

When people contend for their liberty they seldom get anything for their victory, but new masters.

Halifax, Edward F.

39.

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

40.

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

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.

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

43.

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

Guin, Ursula K. Le

44.

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

45.

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

Aristotle

46.

Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.

Gilbert, W. S.

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

Fox, Charles James

49.

I had such a wonderful feeling last night, walking beneath the dark sky while cannon boomed on my right and guns on my left the feeling that I could change the world only by being there.

Butnariu, Viorica

50.

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