This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Revolution is only true revolution if it is a continuous struggle – not just an external struggle against an enemy, but an inner struggle, fighting and subduing all negative aspects which hinder or do damage to the course of the revolution. In this light, revolution is… a mighty symphony of victory over the enemy and over oneself." - Achmad Sukarno, born Kusno Sosrodihardjo
"If a man has lived in a tradition which tells him that nothing can be done about his human condition, to believe that progress is possible may be the greatest revolution of all." - Susan Cullen-Ward, born Susan Barbara Zogu, formerly Williams, née Susan Cullen-Ward
"Revolution is a bitter thing, mixed with filth and blood, not as lovely or perfect as the poets think. It is eminently down to earth, involving many humble, tiresome tasks, not so romantic as the poets think… So it is easy for all who have romantic dreams about revolution to become disillusioned on closer acquaintance, when a revolution is actually carried out." - Lu Xun, or Lu Hsün, pen name of Zhou Shuren
"The social revolution means much more than the reorganization of conditions only: it means the establishment of new human values and social relationships, a changed attitude of man to man, as of one free and independent to his equal; it means a different spirit in individual and collective life, and that spirit cannot be born overnight." - Alexander Berkman
"We believe that the most basic of all changes in human social organization have been the result of three processes. Starting 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, agriculture was invented in the Middle East – probably by a woman. That’s the First Wave. Roughly 250 years ago, the Industrial Revolution triggered a Second Wave of change. Brute-force technologies amplified human and animal muscle power and gave rise to an urban, factory-centered way of life. Sometime after World War II, a gigantic Third Wave began transforming the planet, based on tools that amplify mind rather than muscle. The Third Wave is bigger, deeper and faster than the other two. This is the civilization of the computer, the satellite and Internet." - Alvin Toffler
"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime." - Aristotle NULL
"It is said to have been reported to one of the Roman emperors, as a piece of good news, that one of his subjects had invented a process for manufacturing unbreakable glass. The emperor gave orders that the inventor should be put to death and the records of his invention should be destroyed. If the invention had been put on the market, the manufacturers of regular glass would have been put out of business; there would have been unemployment that would have caused political unrest, and perhaps revolution." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - Author Unknown NULL
"We are working for a revolution. If we do not start it by improving the life of the soldiers, all slogans of reforming and improving society are but empty words." - Chiang Kai-shek
"To bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has at start with each one of us. When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers and sisters with that burning love, that passion, which led to the cross, then we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’" - Dorothy Day
"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
"We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution." - Eric Hoffer
"Under full developed Capitalism civilization is always on the verge of revolution. We live as in a villa on Vesuvius." - George Bernard Shaw
"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, born David Henry Thoreau
"We have two American flags always; one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it it means danger, revolution, anarchy." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"It is not work that kills men, it is worry. Work is healthy, you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction. Fear secretes acids, but love and trust are sweet juices." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Oppression leaves [slaves] no choice other than resignation or revolution." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"In the social production of their existence, human beings necessarily enter into determinate relations, independent of their will, relations of production, corresponding to a given stage of development of their material productive powers. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and tow which correspond determinate forms of social consciousness. the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and spiritual life. It is not the consciousness of human beings which determines their existence, but their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive powers of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same things in terms of right - with the property relations in the framework of which they have thus far operated. From forms of development of the productive powers these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure." - Karl Marx
"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"People never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which they live." - Suzanne LaFollette, fully Suzanne Clara La Follette
"A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past. " - Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy" - Franz Kafka
"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." - George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair
"Love alone can bring about a radical revolution or transformation in relationship; and love is not a thing of the mind. Thought can plan and formulate magnificent structures of hope, but thought will only lead to further conflict, confusion and misery. Love is when the cunning, self-enclosing mind is not." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Physical revolution has no meaning; there is only one revolution, psychological, inward revolution because the human being - you - is the society. You have built this society and in that society, in that culture you're caught; therefore, you are the world and the world is you, not verbally, theoretically or intellectually, but actually. You are the world and the world is you and if you are confused, if you are disturbed, if you are neurotic, unbalanced, whatever structure you create as social morality, as law, as ethics or as religion must equally be confused." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"A revolution is an act of violence whereby one class shatters the authority of another. " - James MacGregor Burns
"I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course." - Jeremy Rifkin
"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first" - Jim Morrison
"When is revolution legal? When it succeeds!" - Johan August Strindberg
"Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked." - John Dewey
"Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. To hang out a sign saying "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not the equivalent of hospitality. But there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen, which is an essential of development. Results (external answers and solutions) may be hurried; processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth, something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked." - John Dewey
"It may be impossible to have a revolution without crimes but that does not make revolution a crime. " - José Bergamin, fully José Bergamín Gutiérrez
"A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation. " - José Ortega y Gasset
"A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle." - Kate Millet, Katherine Murray Millett
"No country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp a shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing. " - Lester Thurow, fully Lester Carl Thurow, aka L.C. Thurow
"Probably no country has ever had as large a shift in the distribution of wealth [as what we've seen in the U.S. in the last 30 years] without having gone through a revolution or losing a major war." - Lester Thurow, fully Lester Carl Thurow, aka L.C. Thurow
"The great revolution is stillness. " - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"When a people, having become free, establish wise laws, their revolution is complete." - Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, fully Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just
"What produces the general good is always terrible or seems bizarre when begun too soon ... The Revolution must stop when it has perfected public happiness and liberty through the laws." - Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, fully Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just
"The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation. " - Louise J. Kaplan
"Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
"Revolution is always based on land. Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated cup of coffee. " - Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, Muslim name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz
"The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man's will. However much the reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, eventually revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph." - Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
"Taken as a whole, the Chinese revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party embraces the two stages, i.e., the democratic and the socialist revolutions, which are two essentially different revolutionary processes, and the second process can be carried through only after the first has been completed. The democratic revolution is the necessary preparation for the socialist revolution, and the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the democratic revolution. The ultimate aim for which all communists strive is to bring about a socialist and communist society." - Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
"The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives" - Marilyn Ferguson