Hisham Matar Quotes

My fellow revolutionaries, liberation is a noble cause. We must fight to obtain it.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Despair and frustration will not shake our belief that the resistance is the only way of liberation.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

An oppressed people will always rise.

Neither God, nor angels, or just men, command you to suffer for a single moment. Therefore it is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means, both moral, intellectual, and physical, that promise success .... Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties.... Let your motto be resistance, resistance, resistance!

Power Concedes Nothing

Movements don't die, because struggle doesn't die.

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

Security isn't what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection.

I have become a prisoner of the peace movement. But you can't say that the termination is coming and then say that you are going back to your own garden to dig.

During my last voyage to America, I enjoyed the happiness of seeing that revolution completed, and, thinking of the one that would probably occur in France, I said in a speech to Congress, published everywhere except in the 'French Gazette,' 'May this revolution serve as a lesson to oppressors and as an example to the oppressed!'

I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

In any social revolution the one thing that keeps it alive is hope.

The removal of a tyrant is not merely justifiable; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist.

It is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

When people rise, they must have a goal worthy of them. Must paltry goods be of concern to them?... The people must rise up not to collect sugar, but to bring down the tyrants.

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Agitated by revolutionary movements, these grow in proportion to the force that resists them.

I've always been proud that I come from people who were activists, who have this indomitable spirit. I am proud to have inherited the spirit of resistance and revolution.

At the moment of greatest love, there is greatest fear, and at the moment of enormous repression, there is resistance, and therefore a chance at revolutionary change.

Sometimes you must live in a violent world in order to get greater justice.

You can Jail a Revolutionary but you can't jail the Revolution. You can run a freedom fighter around the country, but you can't run freedom fighting around the country. You can murder a liberator, but you can't murder liberation.

Dreams have consequences. There is no turning back. A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build. Its temperament is desperate. It is a tormented response to the past, to all that has happened, the recalled and unrecalled injustices - for the memory of a revolution reaches much further back than the memory of its protagonists.

It is wrong to try to avoid the struggle against imperialism under the pretext that independence and revolution are important, but that peace is still more precious.