rebellion quotes

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.

Audre Lorde :

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

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.

Cesar Chavez:

The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.

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.

Oscar Wilde:

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

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.

Robert M. Hutchins:

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Saul Alinsky:

Last guys don't finish nice.

Wendell Phillips:

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

Woody Guthrie:

Take it easy -- but take it.