1,549 Quotes About Revolution

I am despised by an army of undiscerning academic highbrows, and ridiculed by semi-educated and vengeful "China-experts" whose era of translating Chinese into Western categories has now come to an end. The public is ready for non-European vocabularies.

He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.

Communism is not an ideal to be realised: it already exists, not as alternative lifestyles, autonomous zones or counter-communities that would grow within this society and ultimately change it into another one, but as an effort, a task to prepare for. It is the movement which tries to abolish the conditions of life determined by wage-labour, and it will abolish them only by revolution.

All revolutions are declared to be natural and inevitable, once they are successful, and capitalism, as the type of economic system prevailing in Western Europe and America, is clothed today with the unquestioned respectability of the triumphant fact. [from foreword]

As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights... but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man's table.

Revolutions in short are made in the name of the proletariat, not by it, and usually in countries where the proletariat hardly exists.

Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.

Soup kitchens were the prelude to revolution. The revolutionaries might talk about socialism, those who actually revolted wanted 'the right to work'- more capitalism, not its abolition.

Nada es tan desalentador como un esclavo satisfecho.