Quotes about evolution

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.

— George Orwell

Revolutions are not made, they come.

— Wendell Phillips

Revolutions never go backward.

— Wendell Phillips

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

— Plato

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.

— Adrienne Rich

One revolution is like one cocktail, it just gets you organized for the next.

— Will Rogers

All revolutions devour their own children.

— Ernst Rohm

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.

— Harold Rosenberg

No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

— George Sand

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

— George Bernard Shaw

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.

— Sydney Smith

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

— Tom Stoppard

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

— Norman Thomas

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

— Alexis De Tocqueville

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.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

Revolutions are always verbose.

— Leon Trotsky

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

— Barbara Tuchman

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

— Source Unknown

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

— Source Unknown

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

— Raoul Vaneigem

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

— Voltaire

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

— Alice Walker

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.

— Tennessee Williams

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.

— Mao Zedong

Revolution is a tool of the past. A revolving door for corruption. The time has come for an Evolution for all humanity. Violence and hatred have no place in an Evolution.

— Eric Parslow

Revolutions are the only way we can evolve coincidentally. Otherwise we’ll be held back while the people we need to revolt against do.

— James Dye

A revolution lead by fox news and establishment types is not a revolution at all.

— James Dye

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, but the one most responsive to change.

— Charles Darwin