Motivational Quotes

Evolution

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off.

- Marx, Karl

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

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

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

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

Rosenberg, Harold

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

Camus, Albert

The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

Adams, John

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

Wald, George

Men are made uneasy; they flinch; they cannot bear the sudden light; a general restlessness supervenes; the face of society is disturbed, or perhaps convulsed; old interests and old beliefs have been destroyed before new ones have been created. These symptoms are the precursors of revolution; they have preceded all the great changes through which the world has passed.

Buckle, Henry Thomas

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

Inge, Dean William R.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

13.

Evolution has developed man to such a high degree that he builds zoos to keep his ancestors in cages.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Tuchman, Barbara

18.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

Adams, John

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

King Jr. Martin Luther

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I began revolution with 82 men. If I had [To] do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.

Castro, Fidel

29.

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

30.

All revolutions devour their own children.

Rohm, Ernst

31.

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

32.

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

33.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

34.

You said, They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people. -- What, I asked you, is harmless about a dreamer, and what, I asked you, is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

Williams, Tennessee

35.

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

36.

The dead have been awakened -- shall I sleep? The world's at war with tyrants -- shall I crouch? the harvest's ripe -- and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch; Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, its echo in my heart.

Byron, Lord

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.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

King Jr. Martin Luther

39.

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

40.

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

Greene, Graham

41.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

42.

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

43.

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

Genet, Jean

44.

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

Heine, Heinrich

45.

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

Guin, Ursula K. Le

46.

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