Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.
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In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off.
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During my eighty-seven years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.
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Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
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Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.
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The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
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Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Funny
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The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
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During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.
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Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
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The worst of revolutions is a restoration.
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Revolutions are notorious for allowing even non-participants -- even women! -- new scope for telling the truth since they are themselves such massive moments of truth, moments of such massive participation.
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Revolutions are not made for export.
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Revolutions are always verbose.
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To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
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We are the men of intrinsic value, who can strike our fortunes out of ourselves, whose worth is independent of accidents in life, or revolutions in government: we have heads to get money, and hearts to spend it.
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At last I perceive that in revolutions the supreme power rests with the most abandoned.
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Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.
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We are the men of intrinsic value, who can strike our fortunes out of ourselves, whose worth is independent of accidents in life, or revolutions in government we have heads to get money, and hearts to spend it.
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I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.
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Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.
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Those who have the command of the arms in a country are masters of the state, and have it in their power to make what revolutions they please. Thus, there is no end to observations on the difference between the measures likely to be pursued by a minister backed by a standing army, and those of a court awed by the fear of an armed people.
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Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
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The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
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Revolutions are not made; they come.
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Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.
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Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.
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All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
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The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions.
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