revolution

If all properly economic problems were solved once for all . . . the social struggle and strife would . . . [not necessarily] be reduced in amount or intensity . . . in the absence of some moral revolution which could by no means be assumed to follow in consequence of this change itself.

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. 1959

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution. . . . Revolution is but thought carried into action.

The history of mankind is one long record of giving revolution another trial - and then limping back at last to sanity, safety and hard work!

Tree of Liberty: A tree set up by the people, hung with flags and devices, and crowned with a cap of liberty. The Americans of the United States planted poplars and other trees during the war of independence, "as symbols of growing freedom." The Jacobins in Paris planted their first tree of liberty in 1790. The symbols used in France to decorate their trees of liberty were tricoloured ribbons, circles to indicate unity, triangles to signify equality, and a cap of liberty. Trees of liberty were planted by the Italians in the revolution of 1848.

Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.

There is such a thing as a general revolution which changes the taste of men as it changes the fortunes of the world.

Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea ... can be understood as a series of campaigns in the struggle to contain Darwin's idea within some acceptably "safe" and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: flawed applications of Darwin's idea have been exposed and discredited, beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming. They seem to be improved versions, not vulnerable to the refutations that defeated their predeccessors, but are they sound extensions of the unquestionably sound Darwinian core idea, or might they, too, be perversions of it, and even more virulent, more dangerous, than the abuses of Darwin already refuted?

A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal.

Law is justice. In this proposition a simple and enduring government can be conceived. And I defy anyone to say how even the thought of revolution, of insurrection, of the slightest uprising could arise against a government whose organized force was confined only to suppressing injustice.