Tom Stoppard Quotes

Revolution applies a local anaesthetic to one class of society and operates on the other.

Revolutions can be messy but they can't be perceived as unjust.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

Nothing changes without blood flowing.

Bloody revolutions are solid; bloodless ones are not permanent. But we have shed sufficient blood to come to this revolution. It has been shed not only on battlefields, but within the country…There have been many risings, all of which have been suppressed. Let us hope that there will be no more bloodshed. The first duty of our educated people is to enlighten and guide the opponents of our happy revolution.

A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.

The pogroms are oil for the wheels of revolution.

But you know, the system almost destroyed itself while it was goin' on trying to destroy us.

Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason.

Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!

Revolution did not necessarily involve sanguinary strife. It was not a cult of bomb and pistol. They may sometimes be mere means for its achievement.

Revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressor society.

Russia probably knows the true cost of revolutions better than most other countries.

Unless something drastic is done very soon, then bloodshed and violence are going to happen…almost inevitably… A people made desperate by despair and injustice and oppression will use desperate means.

The word Revolution, which we Socialists are so often forced to use, has a terrible sound in most people's ears, even when we have explained to them that it does not necessarily mean a change accompanied by riot and all kinds of violence

A revolution is an idea that has found bayonets.

It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

Social change can be painful for all involved—oppressor and oppressed.

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Agitated by revolutionary movements, these grow in proportion to the force that resists them.

Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence.

Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.

How long can we keep kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?

Revolution by the have-nots has a way of inducing a moral revelation among the haves.