Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

Thomas, Norman

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

Marcos, Ferdinand E.

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

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

Adams, John

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

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Gilbert, W. S.

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

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.

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

11.

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

12.

At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.

Liebknecht, Karl

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

16.

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

17.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Bambara, Toni Cade

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

21.

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

22.

It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.

Skinner, Cornelia Otis

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Castro, Fidel

27.

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.

28.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

29.

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

30.

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

Greene, Graham

31.

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

Tuchman, Barbara

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

King Jr. Martin Luther

38.

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

39.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

40.

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

41.

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Bierce, Ambrose

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

44.

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

Rogers, Will

45.

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

Desmoulins, Camille

46.

All revolutions devour their own children.

Rohm, Ernst

47.

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

Wald, George

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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