Revolution quotes
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"[Joseph] Stalin closes the exposition of these [Leon Trotsky] ideas with the words, "Such are in general the characteristic features of [Vladimir] Lenin's conception of the proletarian revolution.""
"If people understood how the economic system works, there'd be a revolution in a minute."
"You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise. And you can write ten times better than I can."
"I was born in revolution."
"Any profession should have norms around the issue you raise. And, in the words of the great economic thinker Albert Hirschman, we all owe a measure of loyalty to professional norms. But when the norms seem unhelpful or unproductive, one needs to speak up - to activate voice. And in the extreme, if the profession and one's colleagues seem estranged from a thoughtfully selected course of action, you need to consider the possibility of exit. Of course, if you knowingly violate norms or laws, you need to be prepared to face the consequences - or to lead a revolution!"
"Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend - conditioned by the myths of the old order - to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them."
"The house shakes...with the roar of the cannon. No sleep for me tonight."
"Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society."
"The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid."
"We are not the ones who create revolutions. It is the imperialist system and its allies, internal allies, the ones who create revolution."
"The quintessential revolution is that of spirit. Without this, the forces which produce the inequalities of the old order will continue to operate."
"Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words."
"No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it."
"Stamps from Afghanistan are hilarious. You can tell when the revolutions are because suddenly they stop having pictures of the mullahs and the independence monument and they start having fish on them."
"The Fourth Amendment was what we fought the Revolution over!"
"Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution."
"People involved in a revolution don't become part of the system; they destroy the system... The Negro revolution is no revolution because it condemns the system and then asks the system it has condemned to accept them."
"There is such a thing as a general revolution which changes the taste of men as it changes the fortunes of the world."
"What happened in Russia in 1917 wasn't a revolution - it was a coup d'etat."
"When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order."
