Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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

- Adams, John

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

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

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

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

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

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

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

Plato

15.

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

16.

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

Nkrumah, Kwame

17.

After listening to a lecture on evolution by a science professor, a student wrote a poem and titled it The Amazing Professor. The poem read: Once I was a tadpole when I began to begin. Then I was a frog with my tail tucked in. Next I was a monkey on a coconut tree. Now I am a doctor with a Ph.D.

18.

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

Castro, Fidel

19.

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

20.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

21.

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.

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Fonda, Jane

26.

Two million years from now the scientists can start a row by claming that the creatures of that period descended from us.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

30.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

Fox, Charles James

31.

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

Rogers, Will

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

35.

We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act.

Reade, W. Winwood

36.

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

Desmoulins, Camille

37.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

38.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

King Jr. Martin Luther

39.

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Bierce, Ambrose

40.

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.

Conrad, Joseph

41.

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

Tuchman, Barbara

42.

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.

Kapuscinski, Ryszard

43.

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

Gilbert, W. S.

44.

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

45.

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

Peirce, Charles Sanders

46.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

47.

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

Thomas, Norman

48.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

49.

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

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von