Wisdom Quotations

Rebellion

Abigail Adams:
If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

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

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.

Bernadette Devlin:
Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.

Eleanor Roosevelt:
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Eugene V. Debs:
Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.

Frederick Douglass:
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

George Orwell:
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Hannah Arendt:
It is well known that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

Henry David Thoreau:
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

John Steinbeck:
I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Saul Alinsky:
Last guys don't finish nice.

Wendell Phillips:
Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.