Upheaval Quotes

No people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must being in blood, whatever may answer afterward.

All that is solid melts into air. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.

The vessel of Revolution can arrive at port only on a sea reddened by torrents of blood.

Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward.

Politically, [Latin] America is the same as it is physically: the land of the earthquakes.

Spain is a bottle of beer and I am the cork. When that comes out, all the liquid inside will escape, God knows in what direction.

Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.

Everything is going to change.

The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.

A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.

A nation can only regenerate itself in a bath of blood.

Everything new endangers something old. A new machine replaces human hands; a new source of power threatens old businesses; a new trade route wipes out the supremacy of old ports and brings prosperity to new ones. This is the price that must be paid for progress and it is worth it.

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

Comrades, the revolution is on.

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.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.

America is the first country... that can actually have a bloodless revolution.

If revolution insists upon overturning established order, let other peoples make the tragic experiment. There is no place for it in America.

Change will always be violent.

All things around, convulsed with violent thunder, seem to tremble, and the mighty walls of the capacious world appear at once to have started and burst asunder.

I despise all those who fight for peace. It's only the bad guys and the troublemakers who create entertaining and history-changing events.

Liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum.

Changing a political system is not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.