Nicholas M. Butler Quotes

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

Revolutions come in two stages: the bit where everything gets smashed and the bit where you have to build it again. The first is great fun; the second is so very hard.

We're on the cusp, on the brink, of enormous change in this country.

The War will leave none of us as it found us.

We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.

The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.

Countries and individuals do not change unless they undergo a trauma.

Change will always be violent.

Look for me in the whirlwind.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

There is no field of activity for great men without the coming of great wars, great struggles and great revolutions.

I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.

It's typical at Real Madrid that we often seem to be going through a revolution.

This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.

A nation regenerates itself only upon heaps of corpses.

Their peace and their war Are like wind and storm. War grows from their peace.

Revolution is like the daughters of Pelias: it cuts humanity to pieces in order to rejuvenate it.

Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are new worlds born

All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.

Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.

Woman is perpetual revolution, and is that element in the world which continually destroys and recreates.

There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.

Of course, let us have peace, we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties ... " There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.

A world is in flames, and you are cracking silly jokes.