“In a revolution, as in a novel. the most difficult part to invent is the end.”
“The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.”
“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
“''Revolution'' today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.”
“Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.”
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
“Plots, true or false, are necessary things, to raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.”
“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
“Whether a revolutions succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.”
“A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.”
“The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.”
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”
“Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.”
“To be a revolutionary you have to be human being. You have to care about people who have no power.”
“When people contend for their liberty they seldom get anything for their victory, but new masters.”
“Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.”
“The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.”
“So they united, and the Communist revolution took the chain from their legs and wound it around their necks.”
“Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts -- it's what you do with what you have left.”
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.”
“A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.”
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
“You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”
“Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.”
“The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.”
“The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”
“We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”