Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce.
Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children.
If there is one safe generalization in human affairs, it is that revolutions always destroy themselves.
Tout re volutionnaire finit en oppresseur ou en he re tique. Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.
In spite of the existence of the Soviet Union, however, the proletarian revolution during the past years has not recorded a victory in any other country.
The first liberating revolutions never destroyed the large landholding powers that always constituted a reactionary force and upheld the principle of servitude on the land.
[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution.
I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.
All the political movements of our country that have hitherto played any important role in our modern history had been lacking in the ideal at the achievement of which they aimed. Revolutionary movement is no exception.
Not the victims of any specific ideology of the left or of the right, but of the ideological posture as such. This has to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail.
Insurrections made by a few who attempt to raise the people in order to achieve a state of affairs that these very people do not understand, must fear defeat, their inevitable end.
To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion.
Whoever finishes a revolution only halfway, digs his own grave.
I think the big tragedy of the Cuban Revolution was that it became dependent on the Soviet Union, and it became dependent on the Soviet Union under a very reactionary bureaucratic regime led by Leonid Brezhnev.
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal
