Evelyn Beatrice Hall Quotes

It took us a long time to get rid of the effects of the French Revolution 200 years ago. We don't want another one.

Your Majesty, we must do from above what the French have done from below.

They are as blind to some of the tendencies of the time as the French Noblese was before the French Revolution.

People don't see very often their death coming... Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, 'We're doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.'

A revolution in itself is not a blessing. The revolution accomplished by the French people is, indeed, a wonderful event - the most striking, in my opinion, in history; but it may lead to events which will make it a mighty evil.

The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

Certainly we've seen the enormous changes across the whole of the Middle East. The democratic genie is out of the bottle.

You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.

The foundations of society have cracked as a result of the revolutionary reforms....The definitions and boundary lines of good and evil have disappeared.

This is an fascist society. We have to change its authoritarian structure …. And in the process we have to let a lot of people get away with crimes.

A revolution has taken place within the government but it has not yet penetrated civil society.

Revolutions are not made, they come.

Most governments and people want reform. It’s the prospect of change that makes reform rare.

The period of radical reform is finished.

Executing the massive transformation they [the Chinese reform leaders] envision will take most of their political capital and will require firm political control, even as the reforms generate strong forces for social and political change.

Democratization was not a slogan, but the essence of Perestroika.

The fact that the young, perceiving themselves at a turning point in history, do not feel at home in the society and wish to change it, is a sign of portentous changes and of the difficult travails within which a new humanity is born.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

Wars of any magnitude release powerful social and economic forces which can change the whole face of the world.

It sounds ghoulish, but it would have been fascinating to be in Paris in 1789 and watch the revolution begin. I can't even imagine what the energy must have been like that year with all of that change crackling in the air.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.

The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.

Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.