Lucy E. Parsons Quotes

President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I would say that the converse is true.

Progress is always relative: to the oppressed, it can only be viewed as an all or nothing deal - if oppression continues, even in a modified form, then the system must still be attacked until that injustice is eradicated.

The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.

My sole ambition is to rid Mexico of the class that has oppressed her and given the people a chance to know what real liberty means. And if I could bring that about today by giving up my life, I would do it gladly.

I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

They make revolutionary propaganda because they know the privileged class can never be overturned peacefully.

The only thing that's going to free Huey is gun powder.

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

Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

I get asked quite often if I'm an anarchist. If they want to put a label on me, that's fine. What is most important to me is to live in a world that is not being murdered.

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.

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.

Agitators are a set of interfering meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

The peaceful path out of totalitarianism has never been tested.

Democracy, liberty and justice for ALL Mexicans. As long as these demands are unmet, there will be war in Mexico’s territory.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

I want a prepared, organized, orderly and resistless revolution.

Dictators will be replaced, not by civil war and terrorism, but by organized nonviolent movements that will insure that freedom, human rights, and dignity will be honored under all flags.

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.

The position of what is generally called great people has of late become extremely difficult. They are more attacked and calumniated, and judged with less indulgence than private individuals. What they have lost in this way, they have not by any means regained in any other. Ever since the revolution of 1790 they are much less secure than they used to be, and the transition from sovereign power to absolute want has been as frequent as sudden.