Top 1200 Revolutionary Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.

This independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights ... [and] is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.

Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives.

A revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man. If he's not about liberation, if he's not about struggle, if he ain't about building a strong Black family, if he ain't about building a strong Black nation, then he ain't about nothing.

McQueen was daring, original, exciting. He shook up the establishment with his creativity and understood what it takes to be a great British ambassador for fashion. I admired him very much. He was a fashion revolutionary that, like me, made the journey from [Central] Saint Martins to Paris where he put his own unique mark on the industry. He will not be forgotten.

The Regime has become so smug it can't tell the difference among the revolutionary, the innovative, or the merely various. The high command knows so little about the outside that if I came back with a fully equipped chemical laboratory and told them I'd found it in a cave, they'd probably believe that, so long as I brought it back piecemeal in my saddle bags, thus proving I hadn't known it was there beforehand.

I ran because I became convinced after King was shot and killed, and Martin Luther King was one of the great heroes of my life, that politics is not perfect but it's the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live. If we don't like how we live, we can participate in the perfect most revolutionary act in a democracy, it's called voting.

I believe that the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918 when plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads. All evidence indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of day and admitting the right of defence, would have attained the same efficiency with far less abuse and depravity. Was it necessary to revert to the procedures of the Inquisition?

Being part of what I call the "click" generation - where everything has to be fast and revolutionary and you just want more, and it's about likes and consuming - I want to bring new things to the table. A lot of designers say they're scared or overwhelmed because everything moves so quickly now. I think it would be scarier if it was too slow. I want to go fast.

If you feed the people just with revolutionary slogans they will listen today, they will listen tomorrow, they will listen the day after tomorrow, but on the fourth day they will say, "To hell with you."

It's a bit weird, because I don't really know what people expect or think being political is; I just don't get it. What am I supposed to do as a pop star-stroke-revolutionary? Get up and put my balaclava on, go to the grocery store and then invent some Google viruses, and then go to rob a bank to fund my revolution on YouTube?

Wherever we are, we can call for and create these kinds of settings for authentic dialogue. This is the seedbed of social change. In a voiced community, we all flourish. But it's not easy. Revolutionary patience and persistence is required. It can be messy, it is unpredictable, and change, especially structural change takes time - time and leadership and the will of an engaged community. What is needed? In a word, courage.

The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together. ...Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process. ...Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests.

My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently. My painting contains in it the message of pain. I think that at least a few people are interested in it. It's not revolutionary. Why keep wishing for it to be belligerent? I can't. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.

I think what happened with 9/11 is that people sort of felt that it came from nowhere. Whereas I think now we understand the roots are very deep. I say it's like revolutionary Communism, something that is going to have to be knocked out over a very long period of time. This strain of extremism continues to be very strong, whether it's in Afghanistan, or Somalia or Yemen, or any of these places.

I think it’s the right moment to talk about it because it is part of a revolutionary perspective - how can we not only discover more compassionate relations with human beings but how can we develop compassionate relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet and that would mean challenging the whole capitalist industrial form of food production.

Among the fundamental likeness between the Revolutionary Republicans and the Anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate; that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument for general enslavement.

If you think that a coup to overthrow the elected government is a coup everywhere, then you should remember how elections in Ukraine took place in 2004, how elections in Georgia took place in 2003, when the elections results have been torn and thrown away by revolutionary action.

We should all be aware of the fact that when revolutionary - not evolutionary - changes come, things can get even worse. The intelligentsia should be aware of this. And it is the intelligentsia specifically that should keep this in mind and prevent society from radical steps and revolutions of all kinds. We've had enough of it. We've seen so many revolutions and wars. We need decades of calm and harmonious development.

I'm going to introduce you to a revolutionary thought - you can go slower and get there quicker. And that's to do with flow. As soon as you made it two lanes and brought in the 70 (mph) and 50 (mph), you got there quicker. It meant the flow of the traffic was better, there were less accidents, less deaths, I think that's an important factor.

Being born gay, black, and female is not a revolutionary act. Being proud to be a gay black female is.

When I was on 'The Golden Girls,' we'd have eight scenes per show. And when 'Seinfeld' came along, they went to, like, 30 scenes a show, which was revolutionary. 'Arrested Development' has probably got 60 scenes per show. It just keeps emerging as this more and more complex thing. I always try to keep it very simple at its heart.

August [Wilson] elevates in us is the average man in a way that is heroic and real and human. What you do is you sit with our pathology, you invest in our humanity. We're not walking around like walking symbols like we mean something larger. We're just moving throughout our lives and that's the power of the piece. That's revolutionary.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, seeking simplicity doesn't require that you become a monk, a subsistence forager, or a wild-eyed revolutionary. Nor does it mean that you must unconditionally avoid the role of consumer. Rather, simplicity merely requires a bit of personal sacrifice: an adjustment of your habits and routines within consumer society itself.

In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

Men don't like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives - agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate.

On June 22, 2008, at the age of 71, an American revolutionary died. He was a bona fide genius, an outspoken critich, a literary giant and an unprecedented visionary. For 50 years he entertained, challenged and amazed not only my generation, but also ones before mine and well after. He was sensational, brilliant, iconic and unique - the quintessential individual. He was my lifelong hero. His name was George Carlin.

In a free system any large, popular, revolutionary movement should be able to bring about its ends by such a voluntary process. As more and more people see how it works more and more will wish to participate in or support it. And so it will grow, without being necessary to force everyone or a majority or anyone into the pattern.

I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.

This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.

I love the 'Housewives.' I don't watch 'American Idol' or 'X Factor.' I guess I don't like network reality: I like my Bravo; I like documentary programming - I love 'Intervention' and some things on TLC more than others - but the 'Real Housewives' to me are really revolutionary, in terms of giving camera time to women of a certain age.

There are kind of two kinds of awards you can get as a scientist. One is Nobel-like in character: it's for one big thing, for a big revolutionary discovery. And it's wonderfully well known, and of course every scientist would love to get a Nobel prize. And there's a few other similar awards. They're for individual blockbuster discoveries.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion's roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details.

For centuries it was never discovered that education was a function of the State, and the State never attempted to educate. But when modern absolutism arose, it laid claim to everything on behalf of the sovereign power....When the revolutionary theory of government began to prevail, and Church and State found that they were educating for opposite ends and in a contradictory spirit, it became necessary to remove children entirely from the influence of religion.

If we are to live with our feet on the ground, in touch with reality, we must help one another accept the fact that we who are christian are heirs to a body-despising, woman-fearing, sexually repressive religious tradition. If we are to continue as members of the church, we must challenge and transform it at the root. What is required is more than simply a "reformation." I am speaking of revolutionary transformation. Nothing less will do.

X-Men is not a story about superheroes, but a story about the ongoing revolutionary struggle between good/new and bad/old. The X-Men are every rebel teenager wanting to change the world and make it better. Humanity is every adult, clinging to the past, trying to destroy the future even as he places all his hopes there.

Simon Bolivar, when history led him - and as Karl Marx said, men can make history, but only as far as history allows us to do so - when history took Bolivar and made him the leader of the independence process in Venezuela, he made that process revolutionary.

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.

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.

As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoleers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of Howitzers loaded with chain and chopped horseshoes.

It is not the poet's business to save man's soul but to make it worth saving . . . However, few poets have written with a clear theory of art for art's sake, it is by that theory alone that their work has been, or can be, judged; -and rightly so if we remember that art embraces all life and all humanity, and sees in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservative or revolutionary only the human grandeur or passion that inspires them.

That was one of the big problems in the [Black Panther] Party. Criticism and self-criticism were not encouraged, and the little that was given often wasn’t taken seriously. Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them.

I would love 'Awkward Black Girl' to be on television, with the right team of people who understand and get it. If 'Awkward Black Girl' could make it to HBO starring a dark-skinned black girl, that would be revolutionary.

In our decrees, it is definitely proclaimed that religion is a question for the private individual; but whilst opportunists tended to see in these words the meaning that the state would adopt the policy of folded arms, the Marxian revolutionary recognizes the duty of the state to lead a most resolute struggle against religion by means of ideological influences on the proletarian masses.

I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion. The truth of the mater is that hierarchy and violence can't be remedied by more hierarchy and violence. The end doesn't justify the means, the means we choose decide the end we get. The means are the end.

[The Massachusetts constitution] resembles the federal Constitution of 1787 more closely than any of the other revolutionary state constitutions. It was also drawn up by a special convention, and it provided for popular ratification - practices that were followed by the drafters of the federal Constitution of 1787 and subsequent state constitution-makers.

If you look at virtually all of the issues of importance to the people of America - issues like making public colleges and universities tuition-free - Hillary Clinton is now on record for doing that for people making $125,000 a year or less. You know what? That is pretty revolutionary. That will transform the lives of millions of families in this country. That's what Clinton stands for.

Any proposals for the future, while they should use to the full the experience gathered in the past, should not be restricted by consideration of sectional interests established in the obtaining of that experience. Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world's history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.

'America's Dad' is what we called Bill Cosby. And we called him that because, well, what a revolutionary way to put it. Through him, we were thumbing our noses at the long, dreary history for black men in America by elevating this one to a paternal Olympus. In the 1980s, he made the black American family seem 'just like us.'

The only form of revolution beneficial to the people is one which destroys the entire state to the roots and exterminates all the state traditions, institutions and classes…. Day and night [the revolutionary] must have but one thought, one aim – merciless destruction…for him morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way.

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.

The sun flag of the great Comrade Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong Il will forever flutter in the van of our revolutionary ranks that display only victory and honor and will always encourage and drive us toward a new victory.

In order for me to engage in a revolutionary struggle for collective Black self-determination, I have to engage feminism because that becomes the vehicle by which I project myself as a female into the heart of the struggle, but the heart of the struggle does not begin with feminism. It begins with an understanding of domination and with a critique of domination in all its forms.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.

Amid the historic struggle to accomplish the cause of the Juche revolution in this long period after its founding, it has developed into a revolutionary party of Juche, into the great party of Comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and wonderfully performed its role as the organization that guides our people to all victories.

The intelligence community is so vast that more people have top secret clearance than live in Washington. The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

I never heard anything so brilliant in my life as I did that first time I heard Ornette. He played like some revolutionary angel. Soon, we were rehearsing in his place, music scattered everywhere, and he was telling me to play outside the chord changes, which was exactly what I had been wanting to do. Now I had permission.

China's republican politics is like a child who just started schooling. He must have a good teacher and be surrounded by good friends. By the same token, the Chinese people, new to the republican politics, must be educated properly. The revolutionary government should be the people's tutor to impart advanced awareness and experience.