Motivational Quotes

Evolution

Every revolutionary ends up by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.

- Camus, Albert

Best Quotes about Evolution

A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.

Castro, Fidel

Revolutions are notorious for allowing even non-participants -- even women! -- new scope for telling the truth since they are themselves such massive moments of truth, moments of such massive participation.

James, Selma

You said, They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people. -- What, I asked you, is harmless about a dreamer, and what, I asked you, is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

Williams, Tennessee

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Bambara, Toni Cade

It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.

Skinner, Cornelia Otis

A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.

Conklin, Edward

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

Hugo, Victor

Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a revolutionary review, or read a revolutionary speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly revolutionary. What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

Lewis, Wyndham

10.

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off.

Marx, Karl

11.

Two million years from now the scientists can start a row by claming that the creatures of that period descended from us.

12.

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is -- a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

Spencer, Herbert

13.

Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.

Baudrillard, Jean

14.

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren't started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better -- and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

15.

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag, wash it.

Thomas, Norman

16.

Evolution has developed man to such a high degree that he builds zoos to keep his ancestors in cages.

17.

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

Wald, George

18.

At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.

Liebknecht, Karl

19.

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.

Conrad, Joseph

20.

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Greer, Germaine

21.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

Twain, Mark

22.

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts -- it's what you do with what you have left.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

23.

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.

Russell, Bertrand

24.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Tuchman, Barbara

25.

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

Genet, Jean

26.

On the first day of a revolution he is a treasure; on the second he ought to be shot.

27.

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

28.

It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.

Ellis, Havelock

29.

To be a revolutionary you have to be human being. You have to care about people who have no power.

Fonda, Jane

30.

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

31.

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Twain, Mark

32.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

33.

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

Desmoulins, Camille

34.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Trotsky, Leon

35.

Men are made uneasy; they flinch; they cannot bear the sudden light; a general restlessness supervenes; the face of society is disturbed, or perhaps convulsed; old interests and old beliefs have been destroyed before new ones have been created. These symptoms are the precursors of revolution; they have preceded all the great changes through which the world has passed.

Buckle, Henry Thomas

36.

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

37.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

Plato

38.

I began revolution with 82 men. If I had [To] do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.

Castro, Fidel

39.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

40.

In a revolution, as in a novel. the most difficult part to invent is the end.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

41.

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

Rosenberg, Harold

42.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

43.

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Bierce, Ambrose

44.

Whether a revolutions succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.

Heine, Heinrich

45.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

King Jr. Martin Luther

46.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

47.

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

Orwell, George

48.

Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.

Lewis, Wyndham

49.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

King Jr. Martin Luther

50.

True revolutionaries are like God -- they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti