Revolutionary events entail radical changes in society, politics, or technology, often sparked by grievances like inequality or oppression. Examples include the French and Russian Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, and the Arab Spring. They lead to profound shifts, such as the establishment of new governments, social reforms, or technological advancements. While some yield positive outcomes like democratization or economic progress, others result in instability and authoritarianism. Revolutions are complex, influenced by historical context, socio-economic factors, and diverse actors. Their legacies include struggles for power and the need to address the consequences of previous regimes, shaping the course of history.
Revolutions Quotes
1. “You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution.”
— Fred Hampton
2. “The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
— Che Guevara
3. “In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
— Unknown
4. “You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.”
— Huey Newton
5. “The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
6. “There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.”
— Mao Zedong
7. “Socialism is a sacred cause for realizing the demand and desire of the masses of the people for independence; it is a revolutionary cause that advances amid a fierce struggle against imperialism and all other counterrevolutionary forces.”
— Kim Jong-un
8. “I don’t think I’m as revolutionary as Galileo, but I don’t think I’m not as revolutionary as Galileo.”
— Jaden Smith
9. “To be a revolutionary you have to be a human being. You have to care about people who have no power.”
— Jane Fonda
10. “I think every revolutionary act is an act of love. Every song that I’ve written, it is because of my desire to use music as a way to empower and re-humanize people who are living in a dehumanizing setting. The song is in order to better the human condition.”
— Zack de la Rocha
11. “To be yourself is truly a revolutionary act, and I think more and more people should try it, because it’s gotten me a pretty cool life.”
— Lena Waithe
12. “STAR is a very revolutionary group. We believe in picking up the gun, starting a revolution if necessary. Our main goal is to see gay people liberated and free and have equal rights that other people have in America.”
— Marsha P. Johnson
13. “The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.”
— Karl Marx
14. “Being happy is a revolutionary act; I think it spreads, like ripples in a pond.”
— Orson Bean
15. “We must all build national unity, build all revolutionary forces, into one powerful wave to sweep away our main enemy, political imperialism and economic imperialism.”
— Sukarno
16. “Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.”
— Larry Page
17. “The seed is a household object but at the same time it is a revolutionary symbol.”
— Ai Weiwei
18. “Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations.”
— Rosa Luxemburg
19. “The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.”
— H. G. Wells
20. “The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.”
— Elon Musk
21. “The revolutionary sees his task as liberation not only of the oppressed but also of the oppressor. Happiness can never truly exist in a state of tension.”
— Steven Biko
22. “I’m a white wide receiver and that’s revolutionary.”
— Cris Collinsworth
23. “Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.”
— John Updike
24. “Iran is not a nation-state; it’s a revolutionary cause devoted to mayhem.”
— Jim Mattis
25. “I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.”
— Abbie Hoffman
26. “A revolutionary party is, in its essence, the party of its leader that carries out his ideology and cause, and the main thing in its building is to ensure the unitary character and inheritance of his ideology and leadership.”
— Kim Jong-un
27. “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.”
— Saul Alinsky
28. “Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It’s completely impossible. 2- It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
29. “The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
30. “Telling the truth – telling thoughtful truths – should not be a revolutionary act. Speaking truths to power should not be sacrificial, but they are.”
— Luvvie Ajayi
31. “I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.”
— V. S. Naipaul
32. “Every revolutionary poet or lyricist has been criticised for something. If you come up with something new, there will always be people who will object to it.”
— Yo Yo Honey Singh
33. “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.”
— Abraham Lincoln
34. “We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.”
— Adrienne Rich
35. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
— Vladimir Lenin
36. “The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.”
— Emma Goldman
37. “The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.”
— Franz Kafka
38. “Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.”
— Albert Camus
39. “To tell the truth is revolutionary.”
— Antonio Gramsci
40. “I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.”
— Steve Jobs
41. “I believe that if you have revolutionary potential, you must make the world a better place and use it.”
— Lady Gaga
42. “The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
43. “I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”
— Susan B. Anthony
44. “The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.”
— Erich Fromm
45. “If you ever think about me, and you ain’t gonna do no revolutionary act, forget about me. I don’t want myself on your mind if you’re not going to work for the people.”
— Fred Hampton
46. “I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.”
— Bobby Sands
47. “Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.”
— I. M. Pei
48. “The world will always need revolution. That doesn’t mean shooting and violence. A revolution is when you change your thinking. Confucianism and Christianity were both revolutionary.”
— Jose Mujica
49. “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.”
— Fidel Castro
50. “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
— Hannah Arendt
51. “I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.”
— Eldridge Cleaver
52. “If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.”
— George C. Marshall
53. “I haven’t died in a movie in a while,’The Departed,’ ‘Body of Lies,’ ‘Revolutionary Road,’ ‘Shutter Island’ and ‘Inception.’ I guess I did die in ‘The Departed.’”
— Leonardo DiCaprio
54. “A man who dreads trials and difficulties cannot become a revolutionary. If he is to become a revolutionary with an indomitable fighting spirit, he must be tempered in the arduous struggle from his youth. As the saying goes, early training means more than late earning.”
— Kim Jong Il
55. “De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”
— Aldous Huxley
56. “But I think the bomb instead constitutes merely a first step in a new control by man over the forces of nature too revolutionary and dangerous to fit into old concepts.”
— Henry L. Stimson
57. “I’m still a political revolutionary. The fire never went out of me, but perceptions and realizations change.”
— Bobby Seale
58. “I believe I’m going to die doing the things I was born to do. I believe I’m going to die high off the people. I believe I’m going to die a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle.”
— Fred Hampton
59. “If churches around the world would grasp the revolutionary truth that Christ’s transforming power always comes through sacrifice and weakness, it would dramatically alter the landscape of the global church.”
— Joni Eareckson Tada
60. “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.”
— Che Guevara
