Billy Sunday Quotes

The function of a progressive is to keep on protesting until things get so bad that a reactionary demands reform.

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.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

Don't underlook the Sixties; we started eating more vegetables, respecting women, and we shut down Vietnam. We did a lot of good stuff. But it shouldn't shut you down from the moment.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.

Chinese people themselves, they really want change.

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we're doing is not that. But it's partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.

On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.

I don't know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but we might be able to imagine it if your imagination were rich enough.

Sometimes going to jail is just the price you have to pay for social reform or social change.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

Progressive change in this country has never come from above.

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.

You cannot change the psychology of a people by a coup d'etat, or by some quick process of political chemistry convert an idle nobleman into a serious worker, or a medical student into a full-blown statesman.

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

What I have been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.

Especially in the sphere of social activism, I think we tend to unwittingly conceptualize progress or revolution as black and white and having a clear beginning and end.

Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

A revolution simply means great change, significant change, and that's how I'm defining it - great change for the better, brought about through non-violent means.