Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Quotes

Society was passing through a most critical stage. The French Revolution had diseased the imagination and unsettled the understanding of men everywhere. The old foundations of social order, loyalty, tradition, habit, reverence for antiquity, were everywhere shaken, if not subverted. The authority of the past was gone.

It sounds ghoulish, but it would have been fascinating to be in Paris in 1789 and watch the revolution begin. I can't even imagine what the energy must have been like that year with all of that change crackling in the air.

A revolution in itself is not a blessing. The revolution accomplished by the French people is, indeed, a wonderful event - the most striking, in my opinion, in history; but it may lead to events which will make it a mighty evil.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Also, an area that interests me - and it will probably take years to state what I mean - is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.

I feel I understand now why, whenever there are revolutions, Shakespeare is what people turn to. Because whenever a society is on the cusp, about to become something else, they find themselves in Shakespeare.

The French revolution was… to terminate the strife of kings among themselves, and to commence that between kings and people…. The princes of Europe, who had hitherto had no enemies but themselves, viewed it in the light of a common foe.

Revolutions are always the deepest memories of a people

The Russian Communist Party is not just any party. History decreed that the R.C.P was to become a mighty instrument of human progress and a major instrument of the world revolution. Its importance is great and immeasurable in the history not only of Russia but also in that of the whole world

A revolution has taken place within the government but it has not yet penetrated civil society.

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

Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….

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.

Your Majesty, we must do from above what the French have done from below.

If there had been Twitter at the time of the French Revolution, they would have claimed that the French Revolution was caused by twitter.

[In the French Revolution] there is much to approve and much to condemn…. An essential change was necessary for the happiness and dignity of a great people, long in a state of degradation.

The Arab world’s wave of change was a century in the making, Why expect its effects to become clear in the space of months

History teaches that apparent power of organization and armed resistance are of no avail to a cause psychologically undermined. "Revolutions," as a matter of fact, are primarily psychological phenomena.

Revolutions never go backward.