I realized early
on that the academy and the literary world alike -- and I don't think there really is a
distinction between the two -- are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and
bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status,
who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
Harold Bloom
We are for aiding our allies by sharing some of our material blessings with those nations
which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to
government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help
19 countries. We are helping 107 We spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a
2-million-dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers,
extra wives for Kenya government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where
they have no electricity.
Ronald Reagan
The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He
will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation
of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation
be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some
sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial
society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the
industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners,
managers, and technocrats, a ''vanguard'' party, or a State bureaucracy.
Noam Chomsky
A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official
business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it
overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a
skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent
with the true principles of the art of business.
Walter Bagehot
A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office a Republican wants.
Alben W. Barkley
A bureaucrat is a person who cuts red tape sideways.
J. Mccabe
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient
bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
Eugene J. Mccarthy
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Mary Mccarthy
The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.
John Stuart Mill
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government
proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'Rourke
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched,
never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll
ever see on this earth!
Ronald Reagan
If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy; God will forgive you but the
bureaucracy won t.
Hyman G. Rickover
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.
Source Unknown
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
Gore Vidal
Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic
demands that form the habit of discipline.
Barbara Tuchman
We found that the most exciting environments, that treated people very well, are also
tough as nails. There is no bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo... excellent companies provide two
things simultaneously: tough environments and very supportive environments.
Thomas J. Peters
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion
(for themselves and for others) of their power.
John Berger
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Honore De Balzac
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of
functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot
understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
George Bernard Shaw
The difference between management and administration(which is what the bureaucrats used to
do exclusively) is the difference between choice and rigidity.
Robert Heller
Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across
from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, ''What will you have,
sir?'' And I said, ''A glass of hemlock.''
Ernest Hemingway
There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The
legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a
bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.
Elliot Richardson
The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of
the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official
bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean
or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated
itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary
contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but
the roof.
Walter Lippmann
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.
Albert Camus
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka
The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of
threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most
coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a
free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere
semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public
life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and
boundless experience direct and rule. Such conditions must inevitably cause a
brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shootings of hostages, etc.
Rosa Luxemburg
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must
necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war
unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient
bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw
Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
George Bernard Shaw
Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has
the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
George Bernard Shaw
I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead --
ahead of myself as well as you.
George Bernard Shaw
We hate those who will not take our advice, and despise them who do.
Henry Wheeler Shaw
If you value a man's regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper -- and
despise it.
George Bernard Shaw
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
George Bernard Shaw
Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
George Bernard Shaw
I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.
George Bernard Shaw
Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
George Bernard Shaw
The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to
be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of
government officials and policemen.
George Bernard Shaw
Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman
loves a pedigree.
George Bernard Shaw
In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw
Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
George Bernard Shaw
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw
No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the people without desiring
something like a revolution for the better.
Sir Robert Giffen
A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.
George Bernard Shaw
No doubt it is easy to demostrate that property will destroy society unless society
destroys it.
George Bernard Shaw
What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of
it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our
circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.
George Bernard Shaw
The politician who once had to learn how to flatter Kings has now to learn how to
fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.
George Bernard Shaw
No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and
fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a
commercial civilization.
George Bernard Shaw
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be
the same.
George Bernard Shaw
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of
functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.
George Bernard Shaw
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
George Bernard Shaw
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
A fool's brain digest philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into
pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
George Bernard Shaw
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is
more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or
morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
George Bernard Shaw
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw
Assasination on the scaffold is the worst form of assasination, because there it is
invested with the approval of society.
George Bernard Shaw
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
George Bernard Shaw
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him
he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
George Bernard Shaw
Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
George Bernard Shaw
Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
George Bernard Shaw
Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered
on the subject.
George Bernard Shaw
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity
of its parasites.
George Bernard Shaw
Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
George Bernard Shaw
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from
neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
George Bernard Shaw
In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and
unhappiness.
George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to
adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the
crimes.
George Bernard Shaw
Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten
material.
George Bernard Shaw
Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops
dare not denounce it fundamentally.
George Bernard Shaw
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty:
what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw
If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.
George Bernard Shaw
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw
I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
George Bernard Shaw
I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
Richard Crashaw
In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that
it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
George Bernard Shaw
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the
house three days?
George Bernard Shaw
In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and
treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a
year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
George Bernard Shaw
Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the
children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they
don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead
of a bond.
George Bernard Shaw
You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the
stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of
obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the
same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.
George Bernard Shaw
How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?
George Bernard Shaw
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except
the books nobody reads.
George Bernard Shaw
When you've got something to prove, there's nothing greater than a challenge.
Terry Bradshaw
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot
change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to
adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
People do no change with the times, they change the times.
P.K. Shaw
Children are curious and are risk takers. They have lots of courage. They venture out into
a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of
life.
John Bradshaw
The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did
not believe that the world itself was going to last.
George Bernard Shaw
What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they
are nothing but empirics who say ''I know'' instead of ''I am learning,'' and pray for
credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.
George Bernard Shaw
We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?
George Bernard Shaw
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in
circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for
the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're
a Shakespeare.
George Bernard Shaw
Common Sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.
Henry Wheeler Shaw
The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease.
Henry Wheeler Shaw
What's the worst thing that can happen to a quarterback? He loses his confidence.
Terry Bradshaw
Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
George Bernard Shaw
The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who
were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face,
instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.
George Bernard Shaw
How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.
George Bernard Shaw
I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
George Bernard Shaw
She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw
The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high
mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without
understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by
degrading it.
George Bernard Shaw
We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
George Bernard Shaw
I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe
from people.
George Bernard Shaw
Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one,
every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.
George Bernard Shaw
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses
his self-respect.
George Bernard Shaw
Man was created a little lower than the angels and has bin getting a little lower ever
since.
Henry Wheeler Shaw
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact
that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and
dangerous quality.
George Bernard Shaw
I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery
of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that
has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
George Bernard Shaw
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
Erich Fromm
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the
flourishing of a generation.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and
application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet
A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle.
Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
Germaine Greer
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful
that it is so.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to
liberty.
François
Pierre Guillaume) Guizot
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.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Whether a revolutions succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed
to it.
Heinrich Heine
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.
Eric Hoffer
We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way
around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
Eric Hoffer
I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.
Abbie Hoffman
Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Victor Hugo
If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the
greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.
Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
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.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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.
Selma James
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy
Revolutions are not made for export.
Nikita Khrushchev
In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.
Martin Luther King Jr.
You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
''Revolution'' today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.
Wyndham Lewis
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!
Wyndham Lewis
It is easier to run a revolution than a government.
Ferdinand E. Marcos
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to
lose, but their chains. .Workers of the world unite!
Karl Marx
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.
Karl Marx
Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of
thought.
Kwame Nkrumah
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.
George Orwell
Revolutions are not made, they come.
Wendell Phillips
Revolutions never go backward.
Wendell Phillips
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.
Adrienne Rich
One revolution is like one cocktail, it just gets you organized for the next.
Will Rogers
All revolutions devour their own children.
Ernst Röhm
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.
Harold Rosenberg
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.
George Sand
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to
another shoulder.
George Bernard Shaw
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
Tom Stoppard
In a revolution, as in a novel. the most difficult part to invent is the end.
Alexis De Tocqueville
Revolutions are always verbose.
Leon Trotsky
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
Barbara Tuchman
On the first day of a revolution he is a treasure; on the second he ought to be shot.
Source Unknown
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.
Raoul Vaneigem
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.''
Tennessee Williams
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.
Mao Zedong
Women's Liberation calls it enslavement but the real truth about the sexual revolution is
that it has made of sex an almost chaotically limitless and therefore unmanageable realm
in the life of women.
Midge Decter
The backseat produced the sexual revolution.
Jerry Rubin
The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting -- the
war and the revolution -- and the character of the accused -- revolutionary leaders of
millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power -- you can say without
exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.
Leon Trotsky
This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and
absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the
revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will
play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent
revolution, as yet unknown to us.
Alexander Herzen
We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich
fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution,
anarchy.
Henry Miller
America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not
revolution but restoration.
Warren Gamaliel Harding
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent
and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence
and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if
any such is possible.
Henry David Thoreau
Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.
John Mortimer
What we call little things are merely the causes of great things; they are the beginning,
the embryo, and it is the point of departure which, generally speaking, decides the whole
future of an existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of a gangrene, of a
storm, of a revolution.
Henri Frederic Amiel
The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole
southern half of the globe... the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the
greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny and exploitation. More
than an end, they seek a beginning.
John F. Kennedy
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin more even than death.
Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to
privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of
hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and
the chief glory of man.
Bertrand Russell
Thoughts is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless
to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.
Bertrand Russell
The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.
Bernard-Henri Levy
Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions. Trade loves moderation, delights in
compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger. It is patient, supple, and insinuating,
only resorting to extreme measures in cases of absolute necessity. Trade makes men
independent of one another and gives them a high idea of their personal importance: it
leads them to want to manage their own affairs and teaches them to succeed therein. Hence
it makes them inclined to liberty but disinclined to revolution.
Alexis De Tocqueville
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international
relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs,
specifically in the matter of revolution.
Hannah Arendt
War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century
capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which
the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the
unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely
thinkable but practicable. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men
and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and
outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy when
left to itself.
E. J. Hobsbawm
One non-revolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of permanent
revolution.
Source Unknown
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined
as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of
the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the
marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows,
midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in
Europe.
Adrienne Rich
Industrial man --a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to
an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the
golden age of revolution and mental derangement.
Aldous Huxley
It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon
a man than he can bear. Worry is the rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution which
destroys the machinery but the friction. Fear secretes acids; but love and trust are sweet
juices
Henry Ward Beecher
And yet a little tumult, now and then, is an agreeable quickener of sensation; such as a
revolution, a battle, or an adventure of any lively description.
Lord Byron
We are the men of intrinsic value, who can strike our fortunes out of ourselves, whose
worth is independent of accidents in life, or revolutions in government: we have heads to
get money, and hearts to spend it.
George Farquhar
I am thirty-three -- the age of the good Sans-culotte Jesus; an age fatal to
revolutionists.
Camille Desmoulins
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels --
men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never
confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or
a battle.
Alexis De Tocqueville
The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He
will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation
of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation
be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some
sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial
society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the
industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners,
managers, and technocrats, a ''vanguard'' party, or a State bureaucracy.
Noam Chomsky
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from
immigrations and revolutionists.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin
If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary,
it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how
great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or
to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry
and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly,
political, imperative and intolerant.
Leon Trotsky
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
If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because
they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and
that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
Erica Jong
The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation,
somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates
revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was
waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living,
and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate
experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.
Guy Debord
Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his
own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation
as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.
Henry Miller
Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The
crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.
Eric Hoffer
There is such a thing as a general revolution which changes the taste of men as it changes
the fortunes of the world.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
During my eighty-seven years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological
revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual
or the ability to think.
Bernard M. Baruch
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you
are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense
circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
Jean Baudrillard
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
Havelock Ellis
Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves,
low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce,
perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes,
lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage,
floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle
dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity,
neuroses, etc., etc.
Henry Miller
If you cry ''Forward'' you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don't
you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a
revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?
Anton Chekhov
Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.
Thomas S. Kuhn
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a
danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step
toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being
carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become
so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own
future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to
follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to
set things right.
Alexis De Tocqueville
One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general
and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
Frank Herbert
If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of
human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own -- the road
to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do
is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple -- a few plain
words -- ''My Heart Laid Bare.'' But -- this little book must be true to its title.
Edgar Allan Poe
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolutions a minute. 2.
Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was
designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H. L. Mencken
What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which
the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
Walter Lippmann
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a
revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
George Orwell
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
A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to
which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while
their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.
Alasdair Chalmers Macintyre
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought
human equality a millimeter nearer.
George Orwell
Facts are counterrevolutionary.
Eric Hoffer
He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as
beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind
that went into it, that counted -- and the man who was not content to do small things well
would leave great things undone.
Ellen Glasgow
Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.
Ignazio Silone
The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I
don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.
Maya Angelou
As a result of the feminist revolution, ''feminine'' becomes an abusive epithet.
Wyndham Lewis
There must be a world revolution which puts an end to all materialistic conditions
hindering woman from performing her natural role in life and driving her to carry out
man's duties in order to be equal in rights.
Colonel Muhammar Qaddafi
When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward -- or go
back. He who now talks about the ''freedom of the press'' goes backward, and halts our
headlong course towards Socialism.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires.
All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to
acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.
Socrates
It's not the work which kills people, it's the worry. It's not the revolution that
destroys machinery it's the friction.
Henry Ward Beecher
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
Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so:
perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate
child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to
totter for us in maturer life.
George Eliot
To survive there, you need the ambition of a Latin-American revolutionary, the ego of a
grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony.
Billie Burke
Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting
pseudo-equality at the same time. To keep citizens puttering in their yards instead of
sputtering on the barricades, the government has gladly deprived itself of billions in tax
revenues by letting home ''owners'' deduct mortgage interest payments.
Florence King
If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples -- temples which we should
hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and
there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all
that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been
unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our
dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for
the little revolution of his own life only.
John Ruskin
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the
one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the
permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV
was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the
French Revolution. It was an admirable result.
Oscar Wilde
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do
little more than generate irony.
Lionel Trilling
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
Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more
dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.
John H. Vincent
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution
have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
Albert Camus
The Chinese pianist Liu Chi Kung was imprisoned for seven years during the Cultural
Revolution, during which time he had no access to a piano. When he returned to giving
concerts again after he was released, his playing was better than ever. Asked how this was
possible since he had not practice for seven years, he replied: ''I did practice, every
day. I rehearsed every piece I had ever played, note by note, in my mind.''
Bernie Zilbergeld
If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.
If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in
revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.
Mao Zedong
We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North
American continent, but as long as 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
To love without role, without power plays, is revolution.
Rita Mae Brown
We are now in the third stage of the industrial revolution. The first involved machines
which extended human muscle; the second used machines to extend the human nervous system
(radio, television, telephones); the third is now utilizing machines which extend the
human mind-computers. About half of all service workers (43 percent of the labor force by
2000) will be involved in collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, structuring, storing, or
retrieving information... By 1995, 80 percent of all management will be ''knowledge
workers.''
Owen Davies
If the sexual revolution has been a medical disaster, socially it has been a catastrophe.
Why do the media not report and explore the tragic results of the sexual revolution?
Because many are collaborators.
Patrick Buchanan
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined
forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call
middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in
which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this
death is in a sense a revolutionary.
Frantz Fanon
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary
avant-gardism.
Terry Eagleton
To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away
the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual.
Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.
Erica Jong
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
All orthodox opinion -- that is, today, ''revolutionary'' opinion either of the pure or
the impure variety -- is anti-man.
Wyndham Lewis
Who so desireth to know what will be hereafter, let him think of what is past, for the
world hath ever been in a circular revolution; whatsoever is now, was heretofore; and
things past or present, are no other than such as shall be again: Redit orbis in orbem.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and
genius unite; and this rare conjuncture, like that of certain planets, appears to occur
only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant.
Vicomte De Chateaubriand
Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a
dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that
opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses
of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It
is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak
points.
Aleister Crowley
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The
era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence,
contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.
Jean Baudrillard
Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he
never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put
into action.
Orison Swett Marden
Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
Aristotle
To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the
lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of a warrior's
spirit. It takes power to do that.
Carlos Castaneda
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
George Orwell
Constant revolutionizing of production distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last
compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with
his kind.
Karl Marx
Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue.
Robin G. Collingwood
It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from
the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic
orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that
created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never
irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.
Benjamin Disraeli
Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for
bad government.
Ambrose Bierce
The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those
events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was
expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced
little.
Charles Caleb Colton
We had no revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the
fireside, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown.
Oliver Goldsmith
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.
John Adams
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt
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
In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interest are at stake.
Aristotle
Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.
Mariano Azuela
Revolution begins with the self, in the self.
Toni Cade Bambara
Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Ambrose Bierce
So they united, and the Communist revolution took the chain from their legs and wound it
around their necks.
Samuel Bonom
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.
Henry Thomas Buckle
Every revolutionary ends up by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.
Albert Camus
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.
Albert Camus
Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule
to balance the insanity of history.
Albert Camus
I began revolution with 82 men. If I had [To] do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and
absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.
Fidel Castro
A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the
past.
Fidel Castro
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a
democracy in order to have a revolution.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Joseph Conrad
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.
Joseph Conrad
Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.
Camille Desmoulins
I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.
Benjamin Disraeli
Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.
Milovan Djilas
Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution;
when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the
energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old
can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be a revolutionary you have to be human being. You have to care about people who have
no power.
Jane Fonda
The worst of revolutions is a restoration.
Charles James Fox
