“Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.”

“Revolution flashed as revelationary as revelation had been revolutionary.”

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

“Skepticism cannot be revolutionary, even though it speaks the language of revolution.”

“A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing — “the” revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask “what is revolutionary action?” We could thensuggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light. Revolutionary action does not necessarily have to aim to topple governments. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power (using Castoriadis’ definitionhere: ones that constitute themselves, collectively make their own rules or principles of operation, and continually reexamine them), would, forinstance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows us that the continual accumulationof such acts can change (almost) everything.”

“The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight. That is why a poet, the revolutionary of the soul, limits himself to the about-turns of the mind. ”