Georg Brandes Quotes

While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

Tyrannies are overthrown by ideas. Armies are defeated by ideas. Nations, and Time itself, are overmatched by ideas.

You cannot kill an ideology with a bullet. You can only kill it with a better idea.

You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea.

Ideas can never be defeated by military force. They can only be defeated by better ideas.

A revolution is an idea that has found bayonets.

fueled above all by the resistance of the forces and ideas opposed to it.

You cannot fight a people who are fighting for an ideology with no ideas of your own.

Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda.

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

What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.

I believe in nothing here, except a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement.

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches , will take my bloodstained weapon, and consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands.

I'm starting to realize there's no stopping us now. An idea, a feeling, a movement can't just be squashed. It's impossible now.

Both force and money are impotent against ideas.

I'm going to stop a revolution,'' I say. I turn right, and Peter follows me.

Not peace at any price! Chains are worse than bayonets.

We destroy icons - that's what we do.

Dying for an idea,' again, sounds well enough, but why not let the idea die instead of you?

Should the political process not work, there is always the other approach.