Motivational Quotes

Evolution

Revolutions are always verbose.

- Trotsky, Leon

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

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

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Adams, John

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

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

Nkrumah, Kwame

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

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

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

Rogers, Will

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

Fox, Charles James

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

25.

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

Aristotle

26.

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

27.

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

28.

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

Peirce, Charles Sanders

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

35.

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

36.

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

Heine, Heinrich

37.

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

Camus, Albert

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Castro, Fidel

44.

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

Tuchman, Barbara

45.

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

46.

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag, wash it.

Thomas, Norman

47.

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

48.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

49.

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

50.

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

Marcos, Ferdinand E.