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

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

The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces -- in nature, in society, in man himself.

Trotsky, Leon

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

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

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

Guizot, Francois (Pierre Guillaume)

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

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.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

Fox, Charles James

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

10.

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

11.

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Bierce, Ambrose

12.

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

13.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

King Jr. Martin Luther

14.

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

Genet, Jean

15.

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

16.

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

Plato

17.

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

Bonom, Samuel

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Wald, George

24.

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

Twain, Mark

25.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

King Jr. Martin Luther

26.

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

27.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

28.

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

Mencken, H. L.

29.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

30.

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

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.

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.

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

34.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

35.

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

36.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Bambara, Toni Cade

37.

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

38.

Revolutions are not made for export.

Khrushchev, Nikita

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Camus, Albert

42.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

46.

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

Marcos, Ferdinand E.

47.

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

Nkrumah, Kwame

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

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