W. H. Auden Quotes

In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.

We have not made the Revolution, the Revolution has made us.

Late-19th-century America, with all its chaotic change and immense potential, seems to have been the perfect place to become not someone else, but someone new.

For me, 'revolution' simply means radical change.

So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

Nations and races change with the change of periods and the passage of time.

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

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.

Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.

Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

A lot of people know that something very drastic has happened to the very idea of America.

Know yourself and fit yourself to new fashions. For there is a new ruler among the gods.

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

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.

I feel that we have some opportunity in North America to go back and say the American Revolution was the real thing.

Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.

Deeply versed in history, [John Adams] said over and over that America had no special providence, no special role in history, that Americans were no different from other peoples, that the United States was just as susceptible to viciousness and corruption as any other nation. In this regard, at least, Jefferson's vision has clearly won the day.

My parents thought, 'Oh, my God! What's wrong with him? He's possessed or something.' All of a sudden, I stood up and started saying my lines. From then on, that was it. I knew there was something special about the theater for me, something beyond the regular reality, something that I could get into and transcend and become something other than myself.

America is so special, everybody wants to go there. And there's not a thought given to how it got special. It's just assumed it was made that way, I guess. It's just assumed that it's just there. And it's also assumed that it's always going to be there. Call it the golden goose or whatever you want but everybody saying that we have no right to keep anybody out because nobody kept us out, we all had to get here. Nobody here now actually started here. Of course, that's no longer true.