William Morris Quotes

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Tremble, all ye oppressors of the world!

The revolution... is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

Every revolution, bloody or not, has two phases. The first phase is defined by the struggle for freedom, the second by the struggle for power and revenge on the votaries of the ancien regime.

But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.

We happen to be the vanguard of that revolutionary struggle because we are the most dispossessed.

The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

History dictates that unresponsive governments force ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

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.

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Peoples, hear the signal! Arise, for the last battle The International Fights for the Rights of Man! No higher being can save us, No God, no Kaiser, nor tribune Saving us from misery we ourselves alone must do!

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren’t started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better—and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

The oppressed have no alternative—for they have no power—but to fight.

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.

A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!

Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.

For the oppressed peoples and classes, for the peoples and workers who have taken control of their destiny, Marxism is a shining path, a sun of hope and certainty that never sets, a sun that is always at its zenith.

The price of toppling Gadhafi will be steep. But Libyans will topple him, and in doing so, they will bring down with him the castles of fear our dictators thought they had fortified.

The powerful don't make revolutions

To those who had ordered them to death, one of them said: “We die because the people are asleep and you will die because the people will awaken.”