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When the sword of rebellion is drawn, the sheath should be thrown away.
-English Proverb
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Twelve highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion.
-Scottish Proverb
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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
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Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!
-Joseph Addison
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In perpetrating a revolution, there are two requirements: someone or something to revolt against and someone to actually show up and do the revolting. Dress is usually casual and both parties may be flexible about time and place, but if either faction fails to attend, the whole enterprise is likely to come off badly.
-Woody Allen
A Brief Yet Helpful Guide To Civil Disobedience (Without feathers), 1972
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
-Hannah Arendt
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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
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In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interests are at stake.
-Aristotle
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For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches.
-Aristotle
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Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.
-Mariano Azuela
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To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.
-Mikhail Bakunin
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Revolution begins with the self, in the self.
-Toni Cade Bambara
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Revolution is a wasteful, destructive, and inhuman engine of political change. It must be allowed to happen if there is nothing better, but the great challenge to human ingenuity is to find alternative paths to economic and political reconstruction, which can bring basic changes without the massive use of violence. The societies of the- Third World can ill afford the economic and human costs of prolonged civil war. But virtually all of the thinking to date about revolutionizing underdeveloped societies through technology rather than through violence has been designed to serve the political interests of the donor country. The avoidance of revolution has been an end in itself, and very little commitment has been made to the achievement of radical political change through nonviolent means in societies needing revolution. A great nation has an inherent problem, and possibly an insoluble one, in devising a strategy for helping another society to remake its political life without injecting its own interests and values and without coming to dominate the weak.
-Richard J. Barnet
Intervention and Revolution, p. 284
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Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
-Ambrose Bierce
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So they united, and the Communist revolution took the chain from their legs and wound it around their necks.
-Samuel Bonom
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I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.
-John Mason Brown
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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
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A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
(speech), 1866
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A populace never rebels from passion for attack, but from impatience of suffering.
-Edmund Burke
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I had such a wonderful feeling last night, walking beneath the dark sky while cannon boomed on my right and guns on my left the feeling that I could change the world only by being there.
-Viorica Butnariu
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The dead have been awakened -- shall I sleep? The world's at war with tyrants -- shall I crouch? the harvest's ripe -- and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch; Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, its echo in my heart.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
-Albert Camus
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What is a rebel? A man who says no.
-Albert Camus
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The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all -- he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
-Albert Camus
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Books about Revolution
