Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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

- Inge, Dean William R.

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

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

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

Guizot, Francois (Pierre Guillaume)

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

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

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

Aristotle

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

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

Castro, Fidel

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

10.

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

11.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

12.

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

13.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

King Jr. Martin Luther

14.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

Greene, Graham

17.

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

Marcos, Ferdinand E.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Adams, John

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Fonda, Jane

24.

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

Desmoulins, Camille

25.

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

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.

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

28.

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

Wald, George

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

34.

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

35.

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

Plato

36.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

37.

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

Nkrumah, Kwame

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

41.

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

42.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

43.

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

Bonom, Samuel

44.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Trotsky, Leon

45.

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

46.

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

Tuchman, Barbara

47.

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Greer, Germaine

48.

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

Rogers, Will

49.

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

50.

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