Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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

Best Quotes about 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

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

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara

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

Genet, Jean

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

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

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

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

King Jr. Martin Luther

10.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

Fox, Charles James

11.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Trotsky, Leon

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.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Wald, George

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Plato

26.

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

27.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

28.

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

Guizot, Francois (Pierre Guillaume)

29.

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

Bonom, Samuel

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Camus, Albert

33.

Revolutions are not made for export.

Khrushchev, Nikita

34.

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

35.

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

Aristotle

36.

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

37.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

38.

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

39.

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

40.

It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.

Skinner, Cornelia Otis

41.

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

42.

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

Heine, Heinrich

43.

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

44.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

45.

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.

46.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

47.

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

48.

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

Tuchman, Barbara

49.

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

Marcos, Ferdinand E.

50.

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