Song Baorui Quotes

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

What was taken by force, can only be restored by force.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.

The seed of revolution is repression.

Unless something drastic is done very soon, then bloodshed and violence are going to happen…almost inevitably… A people made desperate by despair and injustice and oppression will use desperate means.

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

What has commonly been called rebellion has more often been nothing but a glorious struggle in opposition to the lawless power of rebellious kings and princes

Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny

It is authority that provokes revolution....

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

Insurrection is the exclusive right of the people and of the citizen. Every foreigner, every man clothed with public authority, is outlawed if he proposes it and must be put to death as a usurper of sovereignty and as interested in fomenting troubles for the purpose of doing evil or of adorning himself. Insurrections taking place under a despotism are always salutary. Those which break out in a free state are sometimes dangerous for liberty itself, because the revolt usurps its sublime pretexts and its sacred name. Revolts in free states leave long and painful wounds which bleed a whole century.

I've never really subscribed to the theory that repression breeds rebellion. I don't think that's really true.

We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.

In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

People have a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back.

An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

My view is when you use violence on your people, that never ends well.

When anarchy is declared, the first thing we do, let's kill all the anarchists.

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to Defender of the Faith, than George the Third.