The 70 best quotes from Revolution and social change.

What is a true process of social change and progress in living conditions?

Revolutions are paradigm shifts in which a radical transformation takes place in a cultural sphere or in a society in general. They often generate confrontation because of the contradictions they overcome, but they also make progress more likely.

In this article you will find a selection of phrases of revolution that capture in words the ideas and the conception of the world associated with the revolutionary change of different stages of history, from the hand of important historical figures such as John F. Kennedy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lenin, Kemal Ataturk or Karl Marx, among others.

Phrases of Revolution and struggle for progress.

In the collection of phrases about the revolution that you will find in the following lines, we have not established a specific order obeying a particular criterion. All of them can lead us to reflect on how the social and economic context transforms our way of thinking and vice versa.

Better to die fighting for freedom than to be a prisoner every day of your life. (Bob Marley)

One of Bob Marley's most remembered phrases, referring to the necessity of insubordination and non-obedience in cases of injustice.

2. The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is rotten. You have to make it fall. (Che Guevara)

Against the deterministic vision of revolutionary change: it will not just happen unless people actively move to make it happen.

3. A revolution is an idea taken by bayonets. (Napoleon Bonaparte)

Napoleon, against the idealistic idea that radical changes in society come through the simple exchange of ideas.

4. Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. (John F. Kennedy)

The more a set of needs is oppressed and the more rights are prevented from being exercised, the more it becomes easier for violent revolutions to break out.

5. A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between past and future. (Fidel Castro)

Fidel Castro speaks about the confrontations inherent in revolutions.

6. When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right. (Victor Hugo)

These radical changes can be understood as a rejection of an entire system that although it is well established and can be considered "the normal", it is unjust and harmful to the majority.

7. You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution. (Fred Hampton)

Hampton distinguishes between individuals and contexts that drive revolutionary change.

8. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. (Emiliano Zapata)

A revolutionary phrase that has become a classic.

9. The greatest and most powerful revolutions often begin very quietly, hidden in the shadows. (Richelle Mead)

About the paradoxical character of radical changes when they are in their initial stage.

10. The first duty of a man is to think for himself. (José Martí)

Not depending on the approval of others and seeing beyond the limitations of a culture does not have to be a purely individualistic act; it can also end up benefiting everyone.

11. The only way to support a revolution is to make your own. (Abbie Hoffman)

In the revolutions also the individual wills are collected.

12. You don't change things by fighting the existing reality. You change something by building a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. (Buckminster Fuller)

The simple fact of destroying does not necessarily bring something new.

13. Sometimes you have to pick up a gun to put down a gun. (Malcolm X)

A reflection that characterizes the rejection of unconditional non-violence by this Malcolm X.

14. Poverty is the father of revolution and crime. (Aristotle)

Poverty creates confrontation, according to the Greek philosopher.

15. The sin of silence when they should have protested, makes cowards of men. (Abraham Lincoln)

Irresponsibilities not only come through action, they also come through non-action when it is time to act.

16. Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning and, after its occurrence, it was inevitable. (Bill Ayers)

These changes also affect our historical perspective.

17. Societies in decline have no use for visionaries. (Anaïs Nin)

An interesting aphorism about progress.

18. The end may justify the means as long as there is something to justify the end. (Leon Trotsky)

If the end does not hold, there is no discussion about the sacrifices necessary to reach it.

19. Revolution never goes backward. (William Henry Steward)

Another interesting aphorism about change.

20. Revolution is not a fixed thing of an ideology, nor something of a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. (Abbie Hoffman)

Hoffman sees revolution as inherent in the historical development of societies.

21. There is no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. (Malcolm X)

Another of Malcolm X's phrases about revolution.

22. The most heroic language in the world is revolution. (Eugene V. Debs)

About the tendency to transform oneself by investing great efforts in it.

23. If you want to rebel, rebel from within the system. That is much more powerful than rebelling from the outside. (Marie Lu)

An opinion regarding the classic inside-outside distinction when talking about human organizational systems.

24. Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to revolution. (Albert Einstein)

A personal reflection by this brilliant scientist.

25. Every generation needs a new revolution. (Thomas Jefferson)

Each generation brings with it new ways of living and interpreting reality.

There is no end; revolutions are infinite. (Yevgeny Zamyatin)

Another opinion along the lines of those who see the revolutionary as a fact that is part of the essence of history.

27. You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit or it is nowhere. (Ursula K. Le Guin)

About the implication necessary to drive revolutionary processes.

28. Until victory always. (Ernesto Guevara)

One of the best known revolutionary cries, although it is based on an error: originally, it said "Until victory. Always, fatherland or death". Fidel Castro read it changing the punctuation.

29. We have no right to think that freedom can be won without a fight. (Che Guevera)

Ideological errors can harm people.

30. We have it in our power to begin the world anew. (Thomas Paine)

On the ultimate goal of revolutionaries.

31. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. (Vladimir Ilich Lenin)

An apparent paradox.

32. Every revolution was first a thought in the mind of a man. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

This is an idealistic view of revolution.

33. The seed of revolution is repression. (Woodrow Wilson)

Contrary to what might be expected, oppression feeds disobedience.

34. You cannot make a revolution with kid gloves. (Joseph Stalin)

One of Stalin's most remembered phrases.

35. Art is plagiarism or revolution. (Paul Gauguin)

A very radical dichotomy.

36. The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution. (Huey Newton)

A fundamental distinction by age strata, albeit a very debatable one.

37. It is not the insurrection of ignorance that is dangerous, but the revolt of intelligence. (James Russell Lowell)

Intellectual spheres, at times, can act as a simple defense of the status quo and of what has always been done.

38. Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. (Franz Kafka)

A pessimistic metaphor about revolutions.

39. While they fight separately, they are defeated together. (Tacitus)

On the need for collective organization.

40. A revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressive society. (Paulo Freire)

The revolution seen as a process of gestation.

41. Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they don't give you work or bread, take bread. (Emma Goldman.)

Goldman questions the idea that the present social organization has to be defended simply because it is.

42. Give me time and I will give you a revolution. (Alexander McQueen)

Another of the aphorisms that assimilate revolutions to the advance of history.

43. Revolutions begin with the word and end with the sword. (Jean Paul Marat)

A sequential vision of revolutionary changes.

44. If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. (Emma Goldman)

A personal reflection that has become a very common propagandistic slogan, especially in feminist very common especially in feminist circles.

45. Political power is simply the organized power of one class to oppress another. (Karl Marx)

Marx had a conception of social organization as different forms of class struggle.

46. Revolution means democracy in today's world, not the enslavement of peoples to the corrupt and degrading horrors of totalitarianism. (Ronald Reagan)

Reagan was trying to portray revolutionary processes outside the United States as processes of social corruption that had to be stopped.

47. It is impossible to predict the timing and progress of the revolution. It is governed by its own mysterious wars. (Vladimir Lenin)

Each revolution is unique.

48. Revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters. (Fidel Castro)

Castro questioned whether all dictatorships were equal.

49. You can imprison a revolutionary, but you cannot imprison the revolution. (Huey Newton)

It is not possible to isolate political change by isolating people.

50. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. (Germaine Greer)

A place in which those who have been subjugated have the opportunity to liberate themselves.

51. The revolution that takes place in your head, no one will see. (Gil ScottHeron)

If you do not externalize your ideas, there is no use in rebelling.

52. Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. (Thomas Jefferson)

A paradox based on religious thought.

53. The worst enemy of the revolution is the bourgeoisie that many revolutionaries carry within them. (Mao Tse Tung)

Mao speaks about the contradictions that live within revolutionaries.

54. We fight against misery but at the same time we fight against alienation. (Che Guevara)

A double struggle.

55. A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; besides, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution. (Vladimir Lenin)

Before the revolution, certain situations must exist.

56. Philosophers have limited themselves to interpreting the world in different ways; it is a question of transforming it. (Karl Marx)

Philosophy seen as a tool for change.

57. Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement. (Vladimir Ilich Lenin)

Actions need a coherent way of seeing the problem and of proposing other options..

58. You cannot make a revolution to establish democracy. You must have a democracy to have a revolution. (G. K. Chesterton)

According to this view, revolution arises from a democratic process.

59. Revelation can be more dangerous than revolution. (Vladimir Nabokov)

There are changes of conception which in themselves precipitate change.

60. The French Revolution taught us the rights of man. (Thomas Sankara)

About a qualitative change in history.

61. Revolutions occur in dead ends. (Bertolt Brecht)

When there are no more options left, one breaks with the system.

62. A reform is a correction of abuses, a revolution is a transfer of power. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)

About the qualitative change that comes with revolution.

63. Truth is always revolutionary. (Vladimir Lenin)

A well-remembered aphorism.

64. Those who are inclined to compromise can never make a revolution. (Kemal Ataturk)

This is one of the phrases about the revolution that talk about blind obedience.

65. He who kneels before the accomplished fact is incapable of facing the future. (Trotsky)

Trotsky saw conformism with the present reality as a trap that leads us not to see the new coming.

66. Those who are incapable of defending old positions will never succeed in conquering new ones. (Trotsky)

Progress seen as an accumulation of goals. seen as an accumulation of goals.

67. We cannot have a revolution that does not involve and liberate women. (John Lennon)

On the need to cover different pockets of inequality.

68. There can be no total revolution but a permanent revolution. Like love, it is the fundamental joy of life. (Max Ernst)

Each time new ways will be found to continue progressing.

69. Revolutions are not made by trifles, but are born by trifles. (Aristotle)

A spark can engender transformation.

70. To impute the revolution to men is to impute the tide to the waves. (Victor Hugo)

This phrase of revolution speaks of this change as something systemic linked not to the individual but to collectives.