89 Inspiring Revolution Quotes

In the tapestry of history, revolutions have served as the vibrant threads that reconstruct societies and redefine futures. As agents of change, they inspire movements, challenge norms, and breathe life into the hopes of countless individuals yearning for a better tomorrow. Revolution quotes encapsulate the essence of this transformative spirit, offering insight, motivation, and perspective. Delving into these quotes not only connects us to the fervor of historical moments but also ignites our own passions for personal or societal change. Join us as we explore a carefully curated selection of 89 inspiring revolution quotes, each resonating with the power to evoke thought and inspire action in the quest for justice and progress.

1. “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

2. “If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.” - Emma Goldman

3. “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?” - Dorothy Day

4. “A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.” - Fidel Castro

5. “Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

6. “It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman — and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze — as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter — one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process — sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock — demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution.” - Gloria Steinem

7. “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.” - Aristotle

8. “It is worthy to note, that the early popularity of Washington was not the result of brilliant achievement nor signal success; on the contrary, it rose among trials and reverses, and may almost be said to have been the fruit of defeat.” - Washington Irving

9. “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

10. “But I don't shut up and I don't die.I liveand fight, maddeningthose who rule my country.For if I liveI fight,and if I fightI contribute to the dawn.” - Otto Rene Castillo

11. “Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.” - Vladimir Lenin

12. “Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.” - Leon Trotsky

13. “The first duty of a man is to think for himself” - Jose Marti

14. “The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.” - Leon Trotsky

15. “Everyone ate as a group, and a huge cauldron of dumpster-dived gruel bubbled over a campfire, tended by a grubby-handed group of chefs dicing potatoes and onions on a piece of cardboard on the ground. Huck [Finn] may have been right that a 'barrel of odds and ends' where the 'juice kind of swaps around' makes for better victuals, but it occurred to me that the revolution may well get dysentery.” - Matthew Power

16. “What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?” - Robert Hughes

17. “It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.” - Robert Hughes

18. “...this protracted war will pass through three stages. The first stage covers the period of the enemy's strategic offensive and our strategic defensive. The second stage will be the period of the enemy's strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counter-offensive. The third stage will be the period of our strategic counter-offensive and the enemy's strategic retreat.” - Mao Zedong

19. “The German experience brings us face to face with the major problem of the revolution in Western Europe. In these countries, the old bourgeois mode of production and the centuries-old civilisation which has developed with it have completely impressed themselves upon the thoughts and feelings of the popular masses. Hence, the mentality and inner character of the masses here is quite different from that in the countries of the East, who have not experienced the rule of bourgeois culture; and this is what distinguishes the different courses that the revolution has taken in the East and the West.” - Anton Pannekoek

20. “Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.” - Bertrand Russell

21. “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.” - Mao Tse-tung

22. “SECOND SUNSo much bloodHas been spent in this world,But we have not yet built a sun of blood.Listen, my friend,To these trembling words:A second sun will be born of our blood in the form of a heart.” - Visar Zhiti

23. “In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should pointout to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions isnot that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generatethem.” - Pierre Elliot Trudeau

24. “You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war and a real peasant leader might be a little too much like Pablo. You couldn't wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manifacture one. At that, from what he had seen of Campesino, with his black beard, his thick negroid lips, and his feverish, staring eyes, he thought he might give almost as much trouble as a real peasant leader. The last time he had seen him he seemed to have gotten to believe his own publicity and think he was a peasant.” - Ernest Hemingway

25. “The new world is as yetbehind the veil of destinyIn my eyes, howeverits dawn has been unveiled” - Allama Iqbal

26. “But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.” - Howard Zinn

27. “[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.” - Terry Eagleton

28. “The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say?” - Christopher Hill

29. “Every death even the cruelest deathdrowns in the total indifference of NatureNature herself would watch unmovedif we destroyed the entire human raceI hate Naturethis passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-facethat can bear everythingthis goads us to greater and greater acts” - Peter Weiss

30. “The ones who close the path for peacefull revolution, at the same time open the path for violent revolution.” - Hugo Chavez

31. “N-no-o, all that excitement, it wouldn't reach us,' Timosha spoke gloomily. 'We're like the sunken city of Kitezh, living at the bottom of the lake. We do not hear a thing, and the water over us is muddy and sleepy. And on the surface, way above - why, everything's in flames, and the alarms are ringing.' (“A Provincial Tale”)” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

32. “I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” - Audre Lorde

33. “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” - Arundhati Roy

34. “in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

35. “The revolution goes on; a man does not make the revolution, not a thousand men, not an army and not a party; the revolution comes from the people as they reach toward God, and a little of God is in each person and each will not forget it. This it is the revolution when slaves shake their chains and the revolution when a strong man bends toward a weaker and says, "Here, comrade, is my arm." The revolution goes on and nothing stops it; but because the people are seeking what is good, not what is wicked or powerful or cruel or rich or venal, but simply what is good--because of that the people flounder and feel along one dark road after another. The people no more all-seeing than their rulers once were; it is in intention that they differ.” - Howard Fast

36. “We must overturn so many idols, the idol of self first of all, so that we can be humble, and only from our humility can learn to be redeemers, can learn to work together in the way the world really needs. Liberation that raises a cry against others is no true liberation. Liberation that means revolutions of hate and violence and takes away lives of others or abases the dignity of others cannot be true liberty. True liberty does violence to self and, like Christ, who disregarded that he was sovereign becomes a slave to serve others.” - Oscar A. Romero

37. “Die Revolution hätte mich mitgerissen, hätte sie nicht mit Verbrechen begonnen: beim Anblick des ersten Kopfes auf der Spitze einer Pike zuckte ich zurück. Niemals wird für mich der Mord Gegenstand der Bewunderung und ein Argument für die Freiheit sein.” - Francois-Rene Chateaubriand

38. “Every man who has in his soul a secret feeling of revolt against any act of the State, of life, or of destiny, is on the verge of riot; and so soon as it appears, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away by the whirlwind.” - Victor Hugo

39. “الكارثة الحقيقية هنا هي انهيار القيم والمبادئ والأخلاق، فكيف تكون الجهة المسؤولة عن الأمن وحماية المواطن هي ذاتها الجهةالتي أدارت لسنوات الجريمة المنظمة ومليشيات البلطجة وأطفال الشوارع والسرقة والنهب والاغتصاب؟ كيف تكون عربات الإسعاف والمطافئ وحتى الشرطة أدوات لسحق البشر؟ كيف يمتلك عناصر الشرطة القدرة النفسية على خلع رداء الأمن في لحظات وارتداء رداء البلطجية واللصوص؟؟ إننا نتحدث عن فعل شيزوفريني بحت، انقسام في رؤية الشخص إلى المجتمع وإلى نفسه وإلى طبيعة عمله ودوره في المجتمع.” - Ihab Omar

40. “The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus Paine was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and said magnificent things when it came to Ireland, India and America. One of them was in some ways a revolutionary conservative and the other was a conservative revolutionary. It's important to try and contain multitudes. One of my influences was Dr Israel Shahak, a tremendously brave Israeli humanist who had no faith in collectivist change but took a Spinozist line on the importance of individuals. Gore Vidal's admirers, of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and 'America First'—the most conservative position available. The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.” - Christopher Hitchens

41. “Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.” - Fredric Jameson

42. “DevrimDevrim tinsel bir fenomendir.Politik devrim,sosyal devrim veya ekonomik devrim diye bir şey yoktur. Devrim sadece bireysel ruhlar için mümkündür.Sosyal devrim sahte bir olgudur çünkü toplumun kendine ait bir ruhu yoktur.Tek devrim ruhun devrimidir,bireyseldir.Ve eğer milyonlarca birey değişirse bunun sonucunda toplum da değişir;tersi olmaz.Önce toplumu değiştirip ardından bireylerin değişmesini bekleyemezsiniz.Devrimlerin başarısız olmasının sebebi budur çünkü devrime çok yanlış bir noktadan bakıyoruz.Eğer toplumu değiştirirsek bir gün bireylerin,toplumu oluşturan her bir öğenin de değişeceğini düşünürüz.Bu aptalcadır.” - Osho

43. “What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. Theyhave not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.” - G.K. Chesterton

44. “Then how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

45. “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

46. “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

47. “Your decision not to join the crowd may be what God is waiting for to grant you revelation on how to deliver your family, your country, business, profession or even your church!” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

48. “Another way of remaining in intimacy with God is by remaining in His presence.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

49. “Words are directed to your personalities namely; - God, your hearers, devil and yourself.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

50. “Dominate in your domain; You can do it.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

51. “We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire...” - Cordwainer Smith

52. “The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden.” - Aysha Taryam

53. “Toda sociedad es un sistema de interpretación del mundo (...) Su propia identidad no es otra cosa que ese "sistema de interpretación", ese mundo que ella crea. Y esa es la razón por la cual la sociedad percibe como un peligro mortal todo ataque contra ese sistema de interpretación; lo persigue como un ataque contra su identidad, contra sí misma” - Cornelius Castoriadis

54. “There is nothing your knife handlers can do in the way of rioting and demonstrating that will have any permanent effect as long as, in the extremity, there is an army equipped with kinetic, chemical, and neurological weapons that is willing to use them against your people. You can get all the downtrodden and even all the respectables on your side, but you must somehow win over the security forces and the Imperial army or at least seriously weaken their loyalty to the rulers.” - Isaac Asimov

55. “Each of you must decide where you stand. All we ask is that you refuse to kneel. You are the people. You have the power. Open your eyes. Open your minds. Then close the fingers on your hand.” - Jay Kristoff

56. “FAITES L'AMOUR ET RECOMMENCEZ (make love and make it again)” - Anouk Markovits

57. “You can change any status quo, stand out, walk by faith and not by sight and things will definitely go well with you.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

58. “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.

59. “There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.” - Victor Hugo

60. “Each of us lives with a sword over his head.There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.” - Murray Kempton

61. “Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!” - Terry Pratchett

62. “I want to make a difference, I want to make a change, inspire a revolution, to create, reinvent, and rearrange.” - Meagan Earls

63. “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

64. “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

65. “And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.” - Terry Pratchett

66. “By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.” - Laurent Dubois

67. “Confidence thrills men for it means you won’t be fidgety or excessively jealous when the man is in the midst of people especially those of opposite sex.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

68. “A confident woman knows her worth and so doesn’t fret when her man is highly placed or is often found amidst other women in the course of his business or assignment.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

69. “Ladies, get confident bout yourselves, build up your self-worth and esteem, love yourself and be proud of your achievements and your man will adore you for life.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

70. “A woman can tolerate delays knowing they are not denials; she is diligent, and composed. She is not easily irritated like love; she endures all things, beans all things and can be stretched to any limit.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

71. “A responsible woman guides, controls (albeit subtly), directs with superior knowledge that is higher than that of her contemporaries!” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

72. “A responsible woman doesn’t see opportunities and needs and look the other way pretending not to see them rather she gets to work to ensure things are done properly and her man succeeds in his endeavours.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

73. “This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals - the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

74. “Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?” - Gustave Le Bon

75. “For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.” - Bhim Rao Ambedkar

76. “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

77. “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

78. “In your emotions: exercise Joy over sadness.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

79. “Life is beautiful if you take the best option.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

80. “It turns out horrendous when you choose the wrong options.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

81. “Sow good seeds for a good yield.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

82. “Build up your faith while starving the fears.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

83. “Sow the right words! Think the good thought.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

84. “Don`t complain, Don`t compromise.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

85. “Desire to impact lives! Change destinies and make dreams come true.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

86. “Anyaele Sam Chiyson Leadership Law of Responsibility: Great leaders greet their geniuses through their greatest power of choice, principle-based living and highest means of expressing their voice.” - Anyaele Sam Chiyson

87. “There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.” - Adrienne Rich

88. “Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it.” - Louis de Bernières

89. “Perhaps I was hosting my own personal sexual revolution. You know the kind that will not be televised.” - Sabrina Childress