Protestation

Mao Zedong: Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.

Napoleon Bonaparte: A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.

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

Abraham Lincoln: This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

Gilbert Scott-Heron: The Revolution will not be televised. The Revolution will be no rerun, brothers. The Revolution - will be live.

Thomas Jefferson: I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. (...) It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Camus: Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

Camus: Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.

Natalie Merchant: There is one tradition in America I am proud to inherit. It is our first freedom and the truest expression of our Americanism: the ability to dissent without fear. It is our right to utter the words, "I disagree." We must feel at liberty to speak those words to our neighbors, our clergy, our educators, our news media, our lawmakers and, above all, to the one among us we elect President.

Barbara Ehrenreich: No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Jacob Bronowski: Dissent is the mark of freedom.

Wendell Phillips: Revolutions never go backwards.

Lewis F. Korns: The history of the human race always has been, and most likely always will be, that of evolution and revolution.

Edward Counsel: A constitution imperilled justifies revolution.

John Adams: As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected ... before a drop of blood was shed.

Muhammad Ali: Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

Vaclav Havel: Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

Edward R. Murrow: We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular.

Emmeline Pankhurst: We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.

Camus: What is a rebel? A man who says no.

Camus: The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Marcus Tullius Cicero: Let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law.

G. W. F. Hegel: The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

Goethe: None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Nelson Mandela: It always seems impossible, until it is done.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: A riot is the language of the unheard.

Harriet Tubman: I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.

Michael McFaul: In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.

Fidel Castro: A revolution is not a trail of roses.... A revolution is a fight to the death between the future and the past.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

John F. Kennedy: Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Desmond Tutu: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Malcolm X: You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker.

Henry Ford: If the people understood the banking system, there would be a revolution tomorrow.

Thomas Jefferson: Every generation needs a revolution.

Tupac Shakur: Standing up for your rights does not make you a radical, it makes you a human being.

Che Guevara: The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

Wynton Marsalis: Many a revolution started with the actions of a few.

Eugene V. Debs: The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.

Rosa Luxemburg: History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.

Karl Liebknecht: The basic law of capitalism is you or I, not both you and I.

Karl Marx: Workers of the world you have nothing to lose but your chains nothing to gain but your freedom. Workers of the world unite.

Malcolm X: Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.

Patrick Henry: Give me liberty or give me death.

Tupac Shakur: The desire to revolt against oppression is the highest desire there is.

Johann Most: Above all, what socialist, without flushing with shame, maintains he is not a revolutionary? We say: none!

Jean-Paul Sartre: When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

Lenin: Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.

Lenin: Fascism is capitalism in decay.

Bakunin: To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it.

Bakunin: Capitalist states can maintain themselves only by crime.

Bakunin: Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

Lenin: Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

Nietzsche: Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft-and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them! Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves. Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money-these impotent ones! See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss. Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness-as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne.-and ofttimes also the throne on filth. Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Badly smelleth their idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters. My brethren, will ye suffocate in the fumes of their maws and appetites! Better break the windows and jump into the open air! Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the idolatry of the superfluous! Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the steam of these human sacrifices! Open still remaineth the earth for great souls. Empty are still many sites for lone ones and twain ones, around which floateth the odour of tranquil seas. Open still remaineth a free life for great souls. Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: blessed be moderate poverty!

Rosa Luxemburg: The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built.

Victor Hugo: When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

Fidel Castro: The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson: The seed of revolution is repression.

Karl Marx: But every class struggle is a political struggle.

Mao Zedong: If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.

Malcolm X: Reform is for people who have government connections, revolution is for the people!

Jean Genet: The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man...

Henry Ellis: All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

Charles Wright Mills: Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real. And every revolution must defend itself against this counterrevolution, or the revolution will fail.

Georg Buchner: Whoever finishes a revolution only halfway, digs his own grave.

Mother Jones: I was born in revolution.

W. E. B. Du Bois: Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

Fred Hampton: You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war.

Karl Marx: Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value.

Tupac Shakur: The revolution is not a moment or a day, the revolution is a way of life.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Abraham Lincoln: Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.

George Washington: If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: If nothing is left, one must scream, because silence is the biggest crime against humanity.

Che Guevara: We have no right to believe that freedom can be won without struggle.

Mark Zuckerberg: The real revolution happened when people started using the internet to fight corruption and oppression.

Wolfe Tone: Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not help us they must fall.

Allan Boesak: There was a time when people of the rich nations of the world regarded poverty as a "natural condition" for those living in the poor nations of the world. ... Today we have largely been stripped of this pseudo-innocence. We know that the poor are so poor because the rich are so rich, that the causes of poverty can be traced to deliberate decisions and deliberate economic and political policies designed to benefit the rich and powerful. We know that poverty and unemployment are not just accidents of history but deliberate, even indispensable, components of capitalism as an economic system.

C. C. Colton: Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

Victor Hugo: Revolution is the larva of civilization.

Thomas Jefferson: It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order.

Plato: The common people suffer when the powerful disagree.

John Milton Hay: The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.

Lenin: One of the symptoms of revolution is the sudden increase in the number of ordinary people who take an active interest in politics.

Friedrich Engels: An Ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

Niccolo Machiavelli: Nor do I hold with those who regard it as a presumption if a man of low and humble condition dare to discuss and settle the concerns of princes; because, just as those who draw landscapes place themselves below in the plain to contemplate the nature of the mountains and of lofty places, and in order to contemplate the plains place themselves upon high mountains, even so to understand the nature of the people it needs to be a prince, and to understand that of princes it needs to be of the people.

Henry Clay: An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just: To dare: that is the whole secret of revolutions.

Bertrand de Jouvenel: A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.

John V. Lindsay: Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.

Abraham Lincoln: The sin of silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

George L. Jackson: The economic nature of racism is not simply an aside... Racism is a fundamental characteristic of monopoly capitalism.

Che Guevara: I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.

Karl Marx: A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

Noam Chomsky: Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

Noam Chomsky: If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

Karl Marx: Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.