Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

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

Adams, John

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

Thomas, Norman

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

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

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

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.

10.

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

Camus, Albert

11.

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

Wald, George

12.

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

Bonom, Samuel

13.

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

14.

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

15.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

19.

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

Guin, Ursula K. Le

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

25.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

King Jr. Martin Luther

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Nkrumah, Kwame

30.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

31.

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

32.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Camus, Albert

41.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Bambara, Toni Cade

42.

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

43.

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

Heine, Heinrich

44.

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

45.

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

46.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

48.

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

Marcos, Ferdinand E.

49.

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

50.

I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

Castro, Fidel