Revolutionary Quotes - Page 18

• And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of relative strength.

  Frantz Fanon

  Country, Class, Pay

  Frantz Fanon (1965). “Damnés de la terre”, Grove Pr

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• The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.

  Dan Savage

  Promise, Founding, Pursue

  Dan Savage (2003). “Skipping Towards Gomorrah”, p.8, Penguin

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• To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders.

  Paulo Freire

  Thinking, Self, Revolutionary Leaders

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.132, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.

  James A. Baldwin

  People, Needs, Done

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• I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

  Douglas Adams

  Technology, Order, Careers

  "The Salmon of Doubt". Book by Douglas Adams, 2002.

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• How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

  Antonio Gramsci

  Strong, People, Parent

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• Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.

  Peter Kropotkin

  Figures, Ideals

  "Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel". Book by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 407, 1990.

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• Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Art, Teaching, Land

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• I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

  Dorothy Allison

  Heart, Character, Needs

  Dorothy Allison (2013). “Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature”, p.142, Open Road Media

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• The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.

  Richard Yates

  Running, Grief, Night

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• I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can’t read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance.

  Bell Hooks

  Book, Reading, Writing

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• What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.

  Toni Morrison

  Thinking, Power, Names

  "CHLOE WOFFORD Talks About TONI MORRISON". Interview with Claudia Dreifus, www.nytimes.com. September 11, 1994.

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• Every gesture is a revolutionary act.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Gestures

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.256, Profile Books

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• If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

  Anne Lamott

  Real, Writing, Emotional

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• Instead of learned young people we have donkeys with University degrees. Instead of future leaders we have mollusks with expensive blue jeans and phony revolutionaries with ski masks. And do you know what? Maybe this is another reason why our Moslem invaders have such an easy game.

  Oriana Fallaci

  Blue, University Degrees, Games

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• a revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo. And if it is your wife that is revolting, you can't just split to the suburbs. Feminism, when it truly achieves it's goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.

  Shulamith Firestone

  Goal, Wife, Feminism

  SHULAMITH FIRESTONE (1970). “THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST REVOLUTION”

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• I had a question. "Why does the name Pearl Harbor sound so familiar?" The lieutenant colonel's eyes narrowed. "Pearl Harbor is the most famous U.S. military base in the world," he said crisply. "It's the only place on U.S. soil that has been attacked in a wars, since the Revolutionary War." None of this was ringing a bell, but you already know I'm totally uneducated. Gazzy leaned over to whisper, "It was a movie with Ben Affleck." Ah. Now I remembered.

  James Patterson

  Military, War, Eye

  James Patterson (2009). “Maximum Ride: Max”, p.137, Random House

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• Let's find and remedy all our weaknesses before our enemies get a chance to say a word. That is what Charles Darwin did. ...When Darwin completed the manuscript of his immortal book "The Origin Of Species" he realized that the publication of his revolutionary concept of creation would rock the intellectual and religious worlds. So he became his own critic and spent another 15 years checking his data, challenging his reasoning, and criticizing his conclusions.

  Dale Carnegie

  Religious, Book, Rocks

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• In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

  Douglas Adams

  Moving, Sunday, Dark

  "Life, the Universe and Everything" by Douglas Adams, (Ch. 1), 1982.

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• If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.

  Desmond Tutu

  Hands, People, Injustice And Oppression

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• Carelessness on the part of revolutionaries has always been the best aid the police have.

  Victor Serge

  Police, Aids, Carelessness

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• This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

  Doris Lessing

  Movement, Stage, Enjoy

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.8, HarperCollins UK

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• A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him," my father had told me more than once. "A businessman has business books and a dream has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

  Walter Mosley

  Dream, Father, Book

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• It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.

  Christopher Moore

  Sarcasm, Irritating

  Christopher Moore (2009). “Lamb: A Novel”, p.148, Hachette UK

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• To be honest, I didn't want to believe that Christianity could radically transform someone's character and values. It was much easier to raise doubts and manufacture outrageous objections that to consider the possibility that God actually could trigger a revolutionary turn-around in such a depraved and degenerate life.

  Lee Strobel

  Believe, Character, Doubt

  Lee Strobel (2000). “The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity”, p.225, Harper Collins

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