Sourced and curated.

A state without some means of change is without the means of its own conservation.

Edmund Burke

Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790

★ 7.0

A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting a picture... A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Mao Zedong

1927

★ 7.0

Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.

Edmund Burke

Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790

★ 7.0

Letter

The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.

John Adams

1818

★ 7.0

Interview

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

Che Guevara

1967

★ 7.0

Feminist literature

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Germaine Greer

1970

★ 7.0

The revolution is like Saturn-it eats its children.

Georg Buchner

Danton's Death · 1835

★ 6.9

Song

You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all wanna change the world.

The Beatles

Revolution · 1968

★ 5.5

Slogan

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Gil Scott-Heron

1970

★ 5.4

Historical literature

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Barbara Tuchman

Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 · 1972

★ 5.3

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

Havelock Ellis

1922

★ 5.1

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.

Albert Camus

The Rebel · 1951

★ 4.6

Philosophical literature · Political literature

Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.

Kwame Nkrumah

Consciencism · 1964

★ 4.4

Novel · Allegory · Dystopian fiction

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

George Orwell

Animal Farm · 1945

★ 3.9

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

Fidel Castro

1961

★ 3.9

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays: First Series (Emerson) · 1841

★ 3.8

Novel

No people in the world ever did achieve freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood.

Mark Twain

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court · 1889

★ 3.8

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

1848

★ 3.7

Revolution do not stand still.

Rosa Luxemburg

1918

★ 3.7

History is a relay of revolutions.

Saul Alinsky

Rules for Radicals · 1971

★ 3.7

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

John F. Kennedy

1977

★ 3.7

Essay · Political literature · Philosophical literature

A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The Revolt of the Masses · 1930

★ 3.6

Essay · Magazine · Political literature

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

Hannah Arendt

The New Yorker · 1970

★ 3.6

Letter

How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!

Charles James Fox

1789

★ 3.5

Revolutions are not made; they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.

Wendell Phillips

1852

★ 3.5

Novel

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

Under Western Eyes · 1911

★ 3.5

Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.

G.K. Chesterton

1901

★ 3.5

Political literature · Philosophical literature

In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interests are at stake.

Aristotle

Politics · 350 BC

★ 2.3

Political literature · Philosophical literature

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal and equals that they might be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

Aristotle

Politics · 350 BC

★ 2.3

There can be only one permanent revolution-a moral one.

Leo Tolstoy

1900

★ 2.1

Novel · Dystopian fiction

There are only four ways in which a ruling class can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.1

What a glorious morning is this.

Samuel Adams

1775

★ 2.0

Citizens, would you want a revolution without revolution?

Maximilien Robespierre

1792

★ 2.0

Speech

Better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait till it begins to abolish itself from below.

Czar Alexander II of Russia

1856

★ 1.9

If revolution insists upon overturning established order, let other peoples make the tragic experiment. There is no place for it in America.

Warren G. Harding

Inaugural Address of Warren G. Harding · 1921

★ 1.9

Novel · Dystopian fiction

Why, America’s the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country’s too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn’t happen here!

Sinclair Lewis

It Can't Happen Here · 1935

★ 1.9

Play

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

George Bernard Shaw

1903

★ 1.9

Historical literature

If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

G.M. Trevelyan

1942

★ 1.8

Courtroom speech · Speech

Where all your rights become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labors... Then surely it is braver, a saner and truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.

Roger Casement

1917

★ 1.7

We are engaged in a spiritual war. We are not living in normal times.

Mahatma Gandhi

1921

★ 1.3

Essay · Political literature

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

Henry David Thoreau

The Relation of the Individual to the State · 1848

★ 1.3