In a world constantly evolving, revolutionary ideas have often served as the catalysts for change, innovation, and progress. From the voices of iconic leaders to the pens of visionary writers, revolutionary quotes have the power to inspire and ignite action. Whether you're seeking motivation to challenge the status quo or hoping to find words that resonate with your own journey, our curated collection of the top 51 inspiring revolutionary quotes offers a profound glimpse into the minds of those who dared to disrupt the norm. Join us as we explore these timeless words that not only capture the spirit of revolution but also compel us to envision a brighter, more equitable future.
1. “No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time. ” - Emma Goldman
2. “A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.” - Fidel Castro
3. “Para que los pasos no me lloren, para que las palabras no me sangren: canto. Para tu rostro fronterizo del alma que me ha nacido entre las manos: canto. Para decir qe me has crecido clara en los huesos más amargos de la voz: canto. Para que nadie diga: ¡tierra mía!, con toda la decisión de la nostalgia: canto. Por lo que no debe morir, tu pueblo:canto. Me lanzo a caminar sobre mi voz para decirte: tú, interrogación de frutas y mariposas silvestres, no perderás el paso en los andamios de mi grito, porque hay un maya alfarero en tu corazón, que bajo el mar, adentro de la estrella, humeando en las raíces, palpitando mundo, enreda tu nombre en mis palabras. Canto tu nombre, alegre como un violín de surcos, porque viene al encuentro de mi dolor humano. Me busca del abrazo del mar hasta el abrazo del viento para ordenarme que no tolere el crepúsculo en mi boca. Me acompaña emocionado el sacrificio de ser hombre, para que nunca baje al lugar donde nació la traición del vil que ató tu corazón a la tiniebla, ¡negándote!” - Otto Rene Castillo
4. “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.” - Vladimir Lenin
5. “A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.” - Jose Marti
6. “People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.” - Emma Goldman
7. “Right now, we are in a peak cycle. There’s tremendous energy out there, directed against the state. It’s not all focused, but it’s there, and it’s building. Maybe this will be sufficient to accomplish what we must accomplish over the fairly short run. We’ll see, and we can certainly hope that this is the case. But perhaps not. We must be prepared to wage a long struggle. If this is the case then we’ll probably see a different cycle, one in which the revolutionary energy of the people seems to have dispersed, run out of steam. But – and this is important- such cycles are deceptive. Things appear to be at low ebb, but actually what’s happening is a period of regroupment, a period in which we step back and learn from the mistakes made during the preceding cycle.” - George L. Jackson
8. “The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed.” - Kate Braverman
9. “Grease the guillotine with the fat of tyrants. Pull the concubine out of the clergyman`s bed. Monarch`s blood must flow, as thick as our boots. From there the free republic will rise.” - Friedrich Hecker
10. “Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.” - Christopher Hitchens
11. “You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.” - Ernest Hemingway
12. “So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.” - Thomas Jefferson
13. “The ones who close the path for peacefull revolution, at the same time open the path for violent revolution.” - Hugo Chavez
14. “They (the French) have taken genius instead of reason for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer lightning to light.” - Gouverneur Morris
15. “What a revolution in her ideas!” - Jane Austen
16. “In an age when mass pleasures like television are becoming more feeble and homogeneous, the very act of discrimination becomes a form of protest. At a time when mass marketing of food produces a product so disgusting that it has to be wrapped in distracting gimmicks to be sold, the mere fact of paying attention to what you eat and drink and telling the truth about taste is a revolutionary act.” - Lynn Hoffman
17. “Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?” - Jennifer Donnelly
18. “Organized Christianity that fails to make a disturbance is dead.” - G. Campbell Morgan
19. “Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government.” - Tom Robbins
20. “History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions.” - John Green
21. “Mubarak was so paranoid that anyone he perceived as competent became a threat to him.” - Wael Ghonim
22. “The Prince came to give life unto those whose lives were almost being snuffed out by the devil via the cares of this world.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
23. “We cannot prevail by our own might or strength, we need to plug on to the source of our strength so that we will remain resourceful always.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
24. “You may not attain the highest height with one leap but my dear; you will reach your destination.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
25. “God comes down in the evenings to chat with man, enjoy man's company and find out how man faired in the course of the day.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
26. “The presence of God is so important in the life of believers. There is abundance of all you need to make your life comfortable in His presence.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
27. “Words are directed to your personalities namely; - God, your hearers, devil and yourself.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
28. “De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.” - Aldous Huxley
29. “We will remember the way things used to be, and teach our children to be better than us. The generations that follow will remember with us. In that day, we will all be free” - Rachel Higginson
30. “A conscience is easier to swallow on an empty belly, simpler to swing with a broken wrist” - Jay Kristoff
31. “Don't just float through life; don't just agree to anything and everything, have a course you are known for at all times.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.
32. “[R]evolutions of government cannot be effected by the mere force of argument and reasoning;” - David Hume
33. “. . . and what are you exactly, my friend? Their subordinate? Their employee? Or, I would suggest, their equal? That's what young Karl would certainly have said, and probably still does. Unless he's no longer alive.' Dodger gave Solomon and strange look and Solomon hastened to clarify. "'Mmmm, as I recall, if you go around telling people that they are downtrodden, you tend to make two separate enemies: the people who are doing the downtreading and have no intention of stopping, and the people who are downtrodden, but nevertheless -- people being who they are -- don't want to know. They can get quite nasty about it.' (205)” - Terry Pratchett
34. “The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.” - Bill Mollison
35. “I want to make a difference, I want to make a change, inspire a revolution, to create, reinvent, and rearrange.” - Meagan Earls
36. “Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'.” - Albert Camus
37. “I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I'd told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can't get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can't even pretend that you have, you shouldn't show up. You should stay home, because it's hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed.So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.” - Anne Lamott
38. “The Earth was singing her revolution. She was calling her brave men and women to her defense.” - Rivera Sun
39. “Patience is a virtue not a vice.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.
40. “A responsible woman sees and accepts only the best in a given situation.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.
41. “Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also entails uncertainty, exhausting activity and upheaval of settled habits.Youth is substantially better off: it is not burdened by guilt, and the revolution can accept young people in toto. The uncertainty of revolutionary times is an advantage for youth, because it is the world of the fathers that is challenged. How exciting to enter into the age of maturity over the shattered ramparts of the adult world!” - Milan Kundera
42. “En la vida del revolucionario, la cárcel es un accidente de trabajo.” - Luis González de Alba
43. “The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies” - Sophie Wahnich
44. “Critical pessimists, such as media critics Mark Crispin Miller, Noam Chomsky, and Robert McChesney, focus primarily on the obstacles to achieving a more democratic society. In the process, they often exaggerate the power of big media in order to frighten readers into taking action. I don't disagree with their concern about media concentration, but the way they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them. Far too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation, "propaganda machines" and "weapons of mass deception". Again and again, this version of the media reform movement has ignored the complexity of the public's relationship to popular culture and sided with those opposed to a more diverse and participatory culture. The politics of critical utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empowered, not when they are at their weakest.” - Henry Jenkins
45. “No turtle can be a revolutionist, because revolution requires high speed!” - Mehmet Murat ildan
46. “Don`t descend to the lowest ebb.” - Agu Jaachynma N E
47. “Sow good seeds for a good yield.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
48. “Always contend for the good!” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
49. “Shun darkness and evil vices for they that embrace them wear off with time!” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
50. “Desire to impact lives! Change destinies and make dreams come true.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu
51. “Lifelong learning is like a never ending personal revolution.” - Bryant McGill
