Vilfredo Pareto Quotes

All great revolutions are led by aristocrats.

A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

In the modern world, it is not the poor and the oppressed who have led the great revolutions and/or carried out the worst deeds of violence; rather, it is militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed circles of society.

Revolution is a transfer of property from class to class.

To make a revolution is not in the grain of our people's nature.

It is bad governments, not bad people, who cause revolutions.

I was born in revolution.

The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.

All revolutions are violent revolutions.

The day of reckoning came, and that day was the Terror. The heirs of those who toiled made their account with the heirs of those who played.

If the Kaiser does not abdicate the social revolution is inevitable. I do not want it—in fact I hate it like sin.

No great revolution can happen in a state without revolutions or mutations of private property.

Marxist revolutions generally happened in countries that otherwise could not have carried out an industrial revolution.

Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.

Revolutions are always the deepest memories of a people

In order to evaluate revolutions and revolutionaries, one needs to observe them close up but judge the them at a distance.

In the course of time, however, the insolence of the nobles … induced the people to rise…. The nobility, to save a portion of their power, were forced to yield a share of it to the people.

Without destruction of the State, there is no revolution.

Revolutions are not made for export

If revolution insists upon overturning established order, let other peoples make the tragic experiment. There is no place for it in America.

Revolutions begin with enthusiasm but often end in tears.

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

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.

We find—in the case of political affairs—that the most servile submission to privileged classes, and the grossest abuses of power by these, have been the precursors of the wildest ebullitions of popular fury,—of the overthrow indiscriminately of ancient institutions, good and bad.