Janio Quadros Quotes

Progressive change in this country has never come from above.

I have the greatest sympathy with the growth of the socialist party. I think they understand the evils that surround us and hammer them into people's minds better than we Liberals. I want to see the Liberal party throw its heart and soul fearlessly into reform so as to prevent a reaction from the present state of things and the violent revolution that would inevitably follow it.

If reforms do not come when people are at peace, of course, they have to come through violent upheavals, so as I looked out I thought: "Thank God, that this nation has had the courage to face the need of changes before we reached the point where bloodshed was the only way to achieve a change.

If the government is in jeopardy, it is not because we are unable to cope with revolutionary situations. Jeopardy means that either the leaders or the people do not realize they have all the tools required to make the revolution come true. The tools and the opportunity exist. Only the moral imagination is missing.

Great political and social changes begin to be possible as soon as men are not afraid to risk their lives.

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

Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.

When the fabric of society is so rigid that it cannot change quickly enough, adjustments are achieved by social unrest and revolutions.

For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.

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

Usually, in any revolution people are focused on who wants to have the most power. But the most important thing is the laws that are written during that time.

We did not have a revolution in order to have a democracy.

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 new Russian Revolution is inevitable, and that it may come much sooner than anyone would now dare to hope… I do not believe it possible that the thirst for freedom and decency in the countries of the Soviet Empire can remain much longer unslaked, and that any attempt either to quench it by total repression or to satisfy it by real reforms, will be cataclysmically destructive of the eroded foundations of the entire State system.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

Reforms are less to be dreaded than revolutions, for they cause less reaction.

We are making our revolution slowly and by constitutional methods.

Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, it carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

Havana.- If 1959 was the Year of Liberation, 1960 was the Year of the Agrarian Reform. The nation lived days of intense transformations, not only political but, also, in every aspect of social and individual activity of its citizens.

Without destruction of the State, there is no revolution.

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place.

Since the third century Christianity has always served simultaneously those who supported the social order and those who wished to overthrow it... .

The period of radical reform is finished.

The use of power to bring about radical social and political change in the 1860s carries important implications for the use of federal power to bring about change in matters of race, citizenship, and social welfare today. So long as this remains true—and there us no sign that these issues will go away any time soon.

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.