Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

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

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

10.

After listening to a lecture on evolution by a science professor, a student wrote a poem and titled it The Amazing Professor. The poem read: Once I was a tadpole when I began to begin. Then I was a frog with my tail tucked in. Next I was a monkey on a coconut tree. Now I am a doctor with a Ph.D.

11.

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Fonda, Jane

15.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

Fox, Charles James

16.

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

17.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

King Jr. Martin Luther

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Gilbert, W. S.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

In a revolution, as in a novel. the most difficult part to invent is the end.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

26.

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.

27.

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara

28.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Mencken, H. L.

38.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Trotsky, Leon

39.

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

40.

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

41.

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

Marcos, Ferdinand E.

42.

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

43.

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Zedong, Mao

44.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Bambara, Toni Cade

45.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

46.

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

47.

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

Rogers, Will

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

50.

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