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Connexions Quotations
Revolution
Quotes
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Power doesn’t back up in the face of a smile, or in the face of a threat of some kind of nonviolent loving action. It’s not the nature of power to back up in the face of anything but some more power.
- Malcolm X
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Revolutionary socialists have been accused for many years of wanting to overthrow the US government by force and violence. When they accuse us of this, what they are really trying to do is to imply that we want to abolish capitalism with a minority, that we want to force the will of the minority on the majority. The opposite is the truth. We believe we can win a majority of the people in this country to support a change in the system.
- Peter Camejo
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Social reforms, no matter how valuable and worth pursuing, cannot in themselves defeat capitalism. That requires a revolution: the overthrow of the rule of capital and the state forms through which it rules.
- Ulli Diemer
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The social transformation we are working for is a long revolution – a process that requires the efforts of generations of activists.
- Ulli Diemer
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Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up,
and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.
- Abraham Lincoln
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Acts of resistance and solidarity are often so small that unless you look closely you may never see them.
- Michael Riordon
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Before all else, Marx was a revolutionist. To collaborate in one way or another in the overthrow of capitalist society
and of the State institutions created by that society; to collaborate in the freeing of the modern proletariat ...
this was his true mission in life. Fighting was his natural element. Few men ever fought with so much passion, tenacity, and success...
- Friedrich Engels
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Being a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother’s womb is not enough to make you human. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that achieve power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously adopted different values.
- Grace Lee Boggs
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Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue.
It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
- Oscar Wilde
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For nearly 40 years we have raised to prominence the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history,
and particularly the class struggle between bourgeois and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; ...
At the founding of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry:
The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.
- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
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It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
- Emiliano Zapata
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It is contrary to history to represent work for reforms as a long-drawn out revolution and revolution as a condensed series of reforms.
A social transformation and a legislative reform do not differ according to their duration but according to their content...
people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to
the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.
Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society.
If we follow the political conceptions of revisionism, we arrive at the same conclusion that is reached when we follow the economic theories of revisionism. Our program becomes not the realisation of socialism, but the reform of capitalism.
- Rosa Luxemburg
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The key to organizing an alternative society is to organize people around what they can do, and more importantly, what they want to do.
- Abbie Hoffman
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Making revolution also means breaking our internal chains.
- Graffiti, Paris May 1968
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The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution. The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.
- Graffiti, Paris May 1968
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The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don’t always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!
- Chinua Achebe
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Proletarian revolutions ... criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out...
- Karl Marx
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Revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
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Revolution is never practical until the roar of revolution strikes. Then it alone is practical, and all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers become the most futile and visionary of human language.
- James Connolly
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The shadow which haunts the power structure is the danger that those who are controlled will come to realize that they are powerless only so long as they think they are. Once people stop believing they are powerless, then the whole edifice which they support is in danger of collapse.
- Ulli Diemer
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Struggles for justice are not a fringe phenomenon. They are a force that has changed the world, that can change the world, and that will change the world.
- Ulli Diemer
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Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
- Bertrand Russell
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We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
- Thomas Paine
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We need all the help we can get in overthrowing capitalism, including the help of people who are dead.
- Ulli Diemer
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We’re taking possession. So move out!
- Workers at the Hormel Packing Company tell managers they are taking over the plant
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Without rebellion, mankind would stagnate, and injustice would be irremediable.
- Bertrand Russell
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To learn more about Revolution, explore the Connexions Subject Index Revolution page and the Revolutionary Politics page.
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