''Revolution'' today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.
A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.
A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it.
A nation grown free in a single day is a child born with the limbs and the vigor of a man, who would take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a blaze that he might chuckle over the splendor.
A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.
A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.
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.
All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.
All revolutions devour their own children.
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.
Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.
And then, Sir, there is this consideration, that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.
At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.
Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.
Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Every revolution was first a thought in one man?s mind.
Every revolutionary ends up by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favorable hearers.