Thomas Mann Quotes

All revolutions invariably encourage bad characters and potential criminals.

It was a bad looking mob. It was animated by the essence of revolution.

I fear we may live to see another revolution.

Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.

We have confirmed something we only knew in theory, namely that revolution, in which uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces operate imperiously, is blind and destructive, grandiose and cruel.

The world is too violent right now.

In revolutions authority remains with the greatest scoundrels.

As far as I can tell, 1968 is a year about change, about revolution, about violence, about people turning inwards as community breaks down.

American blood will run in the streets.

Nothing endurable can be produced on a soil soaked with blood and moved by violent agitations.

Terror is the order of the day.

It is then a very unseasonable time to plead law, when swords are in the hands of the vulgare, or to think to restrain them with fear of punishments when they look after liberty and shake off all government.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The masses are principally to be feared because they fly out ever and anon into violence; and from plundering they proceed to the flat levelling of estates.

It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.

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?

If you have no drugs, then you have revolution, and then drugs will be the only thing stopping that.

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

Listen, 'The Purge' actually exists in some form or another in many places around the world when you think about it.

I think this is really a defining moment for the Arab world. The problem is, it is all going to be about blood, sweat and tears. In certain countries it may be just sweat, and in some countries sweat and tears, and in some countries, as you can see, a lot of blood. I think initial instability is something that we are all extremely nervous of.

Injustice boils in men's hearts as does steel in its cauldron, ready to pour forth, white hot, in the fullness of time.

What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.

I was trying to talk about where we are right now as a society, and talk about the fear we all live in, and certainly since 9-11, how it's affected us and the world.

I want to kill the president because I no like the capitalists. I have the gun in my hand, I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.

I grew up during the Revolution of Iran and the war between Iran and Iraq. The things that I saw. The impact. How it changes you. How it changes the way you look at the world.