Elliott Abrams Quotes

Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic.

Do you trust the government? No? In that case, let’s overthrow it tomorrow.

Revolutions of state, many times, make way for new institutions and forms; and often determine in either setting up some tyranny at home, or bringing in some conquest from abroad.

Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.

Russia probably knows the true cost of revolutions better than most other countries.

The collapse of a closed society does not always lead to an open society.

Revolutions begin with enthusiasm but often end in tears.

The men who make revolutions are always despised by those who profit from them.

We want to overthrow the imperial power not because it is Manchurian but because we want republicanism... We republican revolutionaries can never have the notion of becoming emperors after the revolution, like all the peasant rebels did in the past.

Revolution? Unscrew the flag-staff, wrap the bunting in the oil covers, and put the thing in the clothes-chest. Let the old lady bring you your house-slippers and untie your fiery red necktie. You always make revolutions with your mugs, your republic--nothing but an industrial accident.

God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.

I fear we may live to see another revolution.

Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom.

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.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

We have confirmed something we only knew in theory, namely that revolution, in which uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces operate imperiously, is blind and destructive, grandiose and cruel.

At last I perceive that in revolutions the supreme power rests with the most abandoned.

And so I have studied, I have to tell you, revolutions and uprisings for a long time. They are all slightly different, but what they all look for is some kind of a mechanism to go from an authoritarian system to an open, democratic system.

I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.

I was an anti-communist before I was political in other ways.

But Fascism cannot continue in a modified form.

All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

The Russian revolution is one of history's car wrecks. We do know the ending, but we continue to watch. It expresses aspects of human nature we find unacceptable.

If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the Revolution.