Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

Lewis, Wyndham

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

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

Wald, George

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

Aristotle

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

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

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

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

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

Marcos, Ferdinand E.

10.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Trotsky, Leon

11.

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

12.

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

Fonda, Jane

13.

The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.

Guizot, Francois (Pierre Guillaume)

14.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Bambara, Toni Cade

15.

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

16.

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

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.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Gilbert, W. S.

22.

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

23.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

King Jr. Martin Luther

24.

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

Camus, Albert

25.

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

26.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

King Jr. Martin Luther

27.

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

Plato

28.

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

Castro, Fidel

29.

The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.

King Jr. Martin Luther

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Tuchman, Barbara

39.

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

40.

All revolutions devour their own children.

Rohm, Ernst

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

Desmoulins, Camille

44.

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

45.

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

Nkrumah, Kwame

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

48.

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

49.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

50.

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