David Lammy Quotes

Grasp Revolution

Revolution is not a goal in itself.

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

To pass a big idea in this town. You almost need social unrest

Citizens, did you want a revolution without revolution?

Change has no constituency and a perceived revolution has even less.

The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.

Revolution in the modern case is no longer an uncouth business.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.

Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument.

I have always said that we did not expect a revolution in the streets.

If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country.

Revolution comes when human beings set out to correct decadent institutions.

A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power.

I feel I understand now why, whenever there are revolutions, Shakespeare is what people turn to. Because whenever a society is on the cusp, about to become something else, they find themselves in Shakespeare.

I don't know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but we might be able to imagine it if your imagination were rich enough.

The [American] Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.

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 ….

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.

Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.

Conservatives want to keep things as they are, while revolutionists turn things upside down.

Revolutions never go backward.

Campaigns end, revolutions endure.

It sounds ghoulish, but it would have been fascinating to be in Paris in 1789 and watch the revolution begin. I can't even imagine what the energy must have been like that year with all of that change crackling in the air.