Lafcadio Hearn Quotes

When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Usually, in any revolution people are focused on who wants to have the most power. But the most important thing is the laws that are written during that time.

It is when empires begin to fall, that they tend to cause the most mayhem.

Nigeria was once a land of great hope and progress, a nation with immense resources at its disposal. But the Biafran War changed the course of Nigeria. In my view, it was a cataclysmic experience that changed the history of Africa.

There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions. The failure of these institutions to function and the instability of these regimes in Muslim countries, manifest in frequent changes and coups d'état, is most often the consequence of their a priori opposition to Islam, as the fundamental and foremost feeling of the people in those countries.

Politically, [Latin] America is the same as it is physically: the land of the earthquakes.

The most blood-boltered coup may result merely in a substitution of interchangeable military cliques.

Revolutions about taxation have shaped our history.

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

In politics experiments mean revolutions.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.

The more revolutions occur, the less things change.

Revolutions breeds its own excesses.

Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present.

History pays more attention to reformers than others. We pay more attention to dissenters too.

The country is called to the practice of new customs. The walls and surfaces must be cleaned. But minds too must be cleansed, for that is where the error was born.

Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.

Spain is a bottle of beer and I am the cork. When that comes out, all the liquid inside will escape, God knows in what direction.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history. Drive them full speed ahead and keep them on the rails... .

… history itself appears to be abandoning the eruption of events in favor of stable structures

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place.

The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American Policy makers.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love

Iraq is a terrible place. Some fool American is going to come out here and try to redesign it