Harold Rosenberg Quotes

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.

If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?

History is a relay of revolutions

The rôle of the artist is that of a soldier of the revolution.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

A rebellion is not a revolution. It may ultimately lead to that end.

Sometimes art is ahead of revolution.

Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood.

And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.

It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Extreme nationalism and Bolshevism have broken up the old world, a new world is in the making. It is literally true that old things are passing away; all things may become new, granted we have wise, unselfish, and determined guides.

We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it.

The power of a movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people. This change is not the result of force but of dedication, of moral persuasion.

Make the revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.

No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression. If such a movement has caught hold of the imagination of the masses, they will seek a vent in song for the aspirations, the fears and hopes, the loves and hatreds engendered by the struggle.

Revolutions are always the deepest memories of a people

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

We now have a literary movement. it is not very important; it will be followed by a political movement, that will not be very important; then must come a military movement, that will be important indeed

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.

Usually the impetus of a revolution is a relatively small group with positive goals but also a larger collection of people with resentments.

Like it or not, the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether the government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant. American society is about the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American Society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do.

No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.