Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

Desmoulins, Camille

13.

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

Mencken, H. L.

14.

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

15.

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

16.

All revolutions devour their own children.

Rohm, Ernst

17.

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

Marcos, Ferdinand E.

18.

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

19.

Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a revolutionary review, or read a revolutionary speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly revolutionary. What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

Lewis, Wyndham

20.

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

Genet, Jean

21.

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

22.

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

Greene, Graham

23.

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

24.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

25.

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

Tuchman, Barbara

26.

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

Fonda, Jane

27.

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

Twain, Mark

28.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

King Jr. Martin Luther

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Bierce, Ambrose

31.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

32.

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

Guin, Ursula K. Le

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

38.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

39.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

40.

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

41.

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

Camus, Albert

42.

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

Gilbert, W. S.

43.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Bambara, Toni Cade

44.

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

Nkrumah, Kwame

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

48.

The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

Adams, John

49.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

50.

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

Plato