Motivational Quotes

Evolution

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.

Best Quotes about Evolution

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

A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement -- but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

Conrad, Joseph

A nation grown free in a single day is a child born with the limbs and the vigor of a man, who would take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a blaze that he might chuckle over the splendor.

Smith, Sydney

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose, but their chains. .Workers of the world unite!

Marx, Karl

Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world...life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere.

Chardin, Pierre Teilhard De

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

Wald, George

10.

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

Tuchman, Barbara

11.

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

12.

The question is this -- Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new fanged theories.

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.

Guizot, Francois (Pierre Guillaume)

16.

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

17.

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

18.

I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

Castro, Fidel

19.

The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.

Hoffer, Eric

20.

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it.

Inge, Dean William R.

21.

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.

Kapuscinski, Ryszard

22.

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

Azuela, Mariano

23.

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

24.

He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favorable hearers.

Hooker, Richard

25.

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

26.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Bambara, Toni Cade

27.

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

Peirce, Charles Sanders

28.

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

Aristotle

29.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

Hoffer, Eric

30.

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Voltaire

31.

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Zedong, Mao

32.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

Rich, Adrienne

33.

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

King Jr. Martin Luther

34.

The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.

King Jr. Martin Luther

35.

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

Camus, Albert

36.

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

Diderot, Denis

37.

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

Hoffman, Abbie

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Guin, Ursula K. Le

41.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

42.

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

Genet, Jean

43.

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

Camus, Albert

44.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Djilas, Milovan

45.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Lorenz, Konrad

46.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Trotsky, Leon

47.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

Adams, John

48.

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

49.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

50.

After listening to a lecture on evolution by a science professor, a student wrote a poem and titled it The Amazing Professor. The poem read: Once I was a tadpole when I began to begin. Then I was a frog with my tail tucked in. Next I was a monkey on a coconut tree. Now I am a doctor with a Ph.D.