Protest, Resistance and Revolution

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the State.

[The Republican Party] had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.

 

The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.

 

The Gulag Archipelago had already begun its malignant life and would shortly metastasize throughout the whole body of the nation.

 

It is said that this manifesto is more than a theory, that it was an incitement. Every idea is an incitement.

 

No justice, no peace.

 

The Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children.

 

Society is always trying in some way or other to grind us down to a single flat surface.

There never was an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

Savagely is necessary ever}' four or five hundred years in order to bring the world back to life. Otherwise the world would die of civilization.

Die, but do not retreat.

Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?

 

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon’s roar— The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more.

 

J’accuse .

In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression, and pants for deliverance; and by the leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same principle lives in us.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give thewhite man nothing else. But the fact is, you gotto give ’em something. Either your money, your land, your woman, or your ass.

If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there weretwo, they would cut each other’s throats; butthere are thirty, and they live happily togetherin peace.

Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots,” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.

Here I was, in a country where a right tosay how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. . . . I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.

[ On General Douglas MacArthur :] I fired himbecause he wouldn’t respect the authority ofthe President. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the lawfor generals. If it was, half to three-quarters ofthem would be in jail.

If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.

Revolution . . . ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, fromhaving heard what had been done beforecarried to a still greater excess the refinementof their inventions, as manifested to thecunning of their enterprises and the atrocityof their reprisals. Words had to change theirordinary meaning and to take that which wasnow given them.

[ Reply to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s questioning whyThoreau had gone to jail in 1843 for not paying the Massachusetts poll tax as a protest against slavery :] Why are you not here also?