When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right. Victor Hugo
Many a revolution started with the actions of a few. Only 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence. A few hanging together can lead a nation to change. Wynton Marsalis
Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. Abbie Hoffman
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so. Ursula K le Guin
Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at. Bill Ayers
Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. Germaine Greer
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. Hannah Arendt, The New Yorker 12 September 1970
There are seasons, in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. There are periods when ... to dare, is the highest wisdom. William Ellery Channing, The Union, 1829
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, Essays: First Series 1841
It was the most beautiful revolution you’ve ever seen. Omar Sharif, BBC 2011
Poverty of a different kind. Poverty to the extent that families go to the dustbin and others to eat. The requirement of revolution: bread, freedom and social justice. This is the first banner in the square. Dr Mamdouh Hamza
At this point the revolution was the romantic movement in action. And perhaps its greatest legacy to posterity has been its message to the young. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 12/13: The Fallacies of Hope, BBC 1969
I can see them still through the window of the university of the Sorbonne impatient to change the world, vivid in hope, although what precisely they hope for or believe in I don’t know. ibid.
The Revolutionaries wanted to replace Christianity with the religion of Nature. ibid.
And on the name Robespierre one remembers how horribly all this idealism came to grief in the prisons of the terror. ibid.
What in all this glory had happened to the great heroes who spoke for humanity in the revolutionary years? ibid.
Beethoven wasn’t a political man, but he responded to the generous sentiments of the revolution. ibid.
The French Revolution operated in reference to this world in exactly the same manner as religious revolutions acted in view of the other world. It considered the citizen as an abstract proposition apart from any particular society, in the same way as religions considered man as man, independent of country and time. Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancient Regime, 1856
It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution ... The social order destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform. ibid.
The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction. On either side it is pride, but understood in a different way. ibid.
Welcome to the bloody age of the guillotine. France was a hell of a place to be a couple of centuries ago. The country was in the grip of revolution. The king had already been killed along with hundreds of aristocrats. The whole country was being turned on its head. Power now lay in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians who every day were becoming more ruthless. They ordered anyone declared an enemy of the new regime rich or poor be shot or taken to the national razor. But with upheaval came opportunity. For one young refugee from Corsica this was the chance of a lifetime. This is the little-known story of how Napoleon Bonaparte first emerged from obscurity, how he risked everything and set out on a path that would see him crowned Emperor of France. Napoleon: Warriors
There is in all change something at once sordid and agreeable, which smacks of infidelity and household removals. This is sufficient to explain the French Revolution. Charles Baudelaire, Journaux intimes 1887
On July 14th 1789 Paris erupted. Angry crowds stormed through the streets crying, Liberty! Equality! Brotherhood! Empires: Napoleon I: To Destiny, PBS 2000
The Revolution turned into the Terror. Torn by civil war, France was also at war with almost all of Europe. ibid.
The Republic continued to fight for its life. ibid.
On October 5th 1795 crowds of Parisians stormed through the streets alongside national guardsmen bent on restoring the monarchy. ibid.
Revolution would eventually topple the thrones of France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and Turkey. Empires: Queen Victoria’s Empire I: Engines of Change PBS 2001
The revolutions of the Arab Spring happened because people realized they were the power. Mohammed Morsi
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. Franz Kafka
Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution. The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary virtues! Fidel Castro
A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past. Fidel Castro
I have no use for knights; I need revolutionaries. Adolf Hitler
All revolutions devour their own children. Ernst Rohm, to Hans Frank 1934, cited Fest’s ‘The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership’
They always need lawyers after a revolution to straighten out the legal end. The Last Tycoon 1976 starring Robert de Niro & Jack Nicholson & Tony Curtis & Robert Mitchum & Jeanne Moreau & Donald Pleasence & Ray Milland & Dana Andrews & Ingrid Boulting & Peter Strauss & Theresa Russell et al, director Elia Kazan
I can’t stop the revolution. But until it comes let’s have some fun. Nicholas & Alexandra 1971 starring Michael Jayston & Janet Suzman & Laurence Olivier & Tom Baker & Timothy West & & Jack Hawkins & Brian Cox et al, director Franklin J Schaffner, son of Tsar
The revolution has begun! What happiness. The cursed autocracy is finally destroyed. The soldiers have gone on to the streets. The officers are hiding. It’s all so unexpected, and everything is going at a gallop. We’ve all gone mad with joy. Yelena Brutsus, Petrograd housewife
The Russian Revolution was financed by Wall Street. Bill Kaysing
In spite of this grotesque misery, a prodigious impulse was given to public education. Such a thirst for knowledge sprang up all over the country that new schools, adult courses, universities and Workers’ Faculties were formed everywhere. Innumerable fresh initiatives laid open the teaching of unheard-of, totally unexplored domains of learning. Victor Serge
In the years of the greatest peril the soviets and the central executive committee of the soviets included left social revolutionaries (who were part of the government in the first nine months), Maximalists, anarchists, Menshevik social democrats, and even right social revolutionaries – the latter unalterable enemies of the new power. Far from fearing discussion, Lenin seeks after it, having Martov and Dan, who had been expelled from the All-Russian executive, invited to come to take the floor. He feels that he has something to learn from their merciless criticism. Victor Serge
How far they had soared, these Bolsheviki, from a despised and hunted sect less than four months ago, to this supreme place, the helm of great Russia in the full tide of insurrection! John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World
The Imperial family was suddenly slaughtered in this room. The new Soviet government had decided they were too dangerous to be left alive. Great Crimes & Trials s1e16: The Massacre of the Tsar and the Royal Family, BBC 1993
The autocracy of the Tsars was strongly upheld by the Russian Orthodox Church which was controlled by a government department. ibid.
The Tsar’s divorce from reality was made worse by the arrival at court of an illiterate holy man, Rasputin. He was a drunkard with a scandalous sex life. But the Tsarina became convinced that he could help control Alexander’s haemophilia. And he was soon her trusted adviser and closely involved with the family. ibid.