Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

We are living in one of those rare moments in history when things may come apart and be put back together again in ways that will determine the future for decades or more, despite the endless innovations of technology.

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.

The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution - but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.

Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….

I have found here in America a philosophic revolution, philosophically effected.

In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to (by both) the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.

In every revolution on Earth, consciousness came first.

The Arab world’s wave of change was a century in the making, Why expect its effects to become clear in the space of months

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.

A revolution is generally only evolution--an explosive sequence of events crowded into a short space of time, but leaving more of the ancient regime untouched than usually is at first apparent.

… 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.

I like to think I've changed the centre of gravity on lots of national debates.

I want the system to change so I think you could call that a revolution.

the reason for revolution is so the good things in life circulate.

The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.

The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice.

Those who did not live during the years close to 1789 do not know the pleasure of living.

I think we're in a very distinctively different historical moment. I mean, I think that you had two things that were operating in the 1930s that seem to be, in many ways, to have been weakened or disappeared. And of course the beginning of the 21st century, I mean, you have - at one level you had massive social movements.

The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same.

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.

I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.