Revolt Quotes

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“They want us to be afraid.
They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes.
They want us to barricade our doors
and hide our children.
Their aim is to make us fear life itself!
They want us to hate.
They want us to hate 'the other'.
They want us to practice aggression
and perfect antagonism.
Their aim is to divide us all!
They want us to be inhuman.
They want us to throw out our kindness.
They want us to bury our love
and burn our hope.
Their aim is to take all our light!
They think their bricked walls
will separate us.
They think their damned bombs
will defeat us.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that my soul and your soul are old friends.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that when they cut you I bleed.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that we will never be afraid,
we will never hate
and we will never be silent
for life is ours!”
― Kamand Kojouri

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Give me liberty or give me death."

[From a speech given at Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt's Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]”
― Patrick Henry, Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death

“The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and -- to add insult to injury -- at a profit.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“Didn't people consider what could happen if armies of farm animals united in revolt?”
― J.D. Robb, Indulgence in Death

“Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

“When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don't have clean water, when you don't have a sewer system, when you don't have electricity, and on top of that you live under one of the most repressive regimes right now... Well, put all that together, and it's a ticking bomb. It's not of a question of threat; it is question of looking around at the present environment and making a rational prognosis.”
― Mohamed ElBaradei

“To call the population of strangers in the midst of which we live "society" is such a usurpation that even the sociologists wonder if they should abandon a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter. Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions under names like "colleague," "contact," "buddy," acquaintance," or "date." Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Insurgence and all forms of evil in a society doesn't describes her as a failure, but vividly shows a lack of love for one another.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“Beware the build-up of an inward wound,
For it will at last burst forth;
Avoid, while you can, distress to one heart,
For a single moan can quake the Earth.”
― Saadi, The Gulistan: or Rose-Garden or Shekh Muslihu'd-din Sadi of Shiraz

“Ja sam sve što kažete da jesam, i još gore od toga. I da nisam, ipak jesam. Šta imam od toga?! (Bol i revolt)”
― Marko Šelić

“There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is – revolting. It's mere vomiting.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“When a constitution and its laws are no longer followed by a government, it falls on the governed to revolt in order to restore them.”
― Jeffrey Fry

“The acquisition of knowledge for which no use can be found is a sure method of driving a man to revolt.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“Some stood up for the prince, declaring that he would set things to right, while others argued that nothing good could ever come from Galephy. Most, however - as people are apt to do when they do not think they can change their circumstances - raised their glasses to their lips and ignored the entire situation.”
― Lindsey Renee Backen, The Secret of Sentarra

“O woman
who is not separate from us
who is chained beaten strangled
this song is for you

O woman
who is not separate from the homeland
who is oppressed silenced persecuted
this fury is for you

O woman
who rages against this regime
who marches resists protests
this prayer is for you

O woman
whose wild tresses
are tied with a noose
this cry is for you
we rise together for you

O Mahsa
from your blood
poppies will grow
this revolution is for you”
― Kamand Kojouri

“I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!”
― Paddy Chayefsky, Network [Screenplay]

“Οι δικοί μου άνθρωποι ξέρουν και να φροντίζουν μα και να πολεμούν. Κουβαλούν μέσα τους και σκληρότητα και τρυφερότητα, τους εκμεταλλεύονται και τους παραπετάνε, τους απορρίπτουν σαν απολίτιστα στουρνάρια και σαν κατακάθια που παρασιτούν με επιδόματα∙ κάνουν τους καλούς φιλελεύθερους πολίτες να απομακρύνονται αηδιασμένοι και αποτελούν τα κατεξοχήν εξεγερμένα υποκείμενα της νεοφιλελεύθερης κοινωνίας. Έτσι και κάποιος πλήγωνε αυτούς που αγαπάνε, θα έτρωγε ροπαλιά στο κεφάλι απ’ τον καθέναν απ’ αυτούς.”
― D. Hunter, Chav Solidarity

“When he turns tyrant, and makes his subjects his prey to devour and destroy, instead of his charge to defend and cherish, we are bound to throw off our allegiance to him (the ruler), and to resist.”
― Jonathan Mayhew

“We cannot prevail,' said Walayat Shah. 'The Jehad is dead. Those who slew the women and the babes have slain it also. To slay in battle or in hot blood, that is well. And to kill men, if they be unbelievers, is to achieve Paradise. But to slaughter captive women who have suffered the harshness of war and sorrow, and been robbed thereby of all strength and will, is a deed to blacken the sun! I will fight no more against the feringhis, since God can no longer be upon our side.”
― M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

“The revolution in Manila was being led by young intellectuals, sons of merchants and professionals who had been educated in Europe and who had planned their revolt using the theories of the French Revolution. Isio had long, scraggly hair, bare feet, and eyes that betrayed the many years of sadness and labor his people had endured. With a look of pity and incredulity, Salas finally asked, "How is it possible that you survived?”
― Eric Gamalinda, My Sad Republic

“Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation – none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy. Who will say it? Will America say, We have stolen it, or France step down? Will Russia confess, or Poland say, We have sinned? All bloated on their scraps of destiny, all swaggering in the immunity of superstition. Ishmael, who was saved in the wilderness, and given shade in the desert, and a deadly treasure under you: has Mercy made you wise? Will Ishmael declare, We are in debt forever? Therefore the lands belong to none of you, the borders do not hold, the Law will never serve the lawless. To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation’s sweetest dreams of itself. The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonoured, have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place, you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a thread. Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you. You decompose behind your flimsy armour, your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love. The land is not yours, the land has been taken back, your shrines fall through empty air, your tablets are quickly revised, and you bow down in hell beside your hired torturers, and still you count your battalions and crank out your marching songs. Your righteous enemy is listening. He hears your anthem full of blood and vanity, and your children singing to themselves. He has overturned the vehicle of nationhood, he has spilled the precious cargo, and every nation he has taken back. Because you are swollen with your little time. Because you do not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live without God. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy

“Everything on the mainstream media is what the oppressors want me to know, everything that is not there is what I should know.”
― Seun Ayilara

“A friend of mine who is a Black Christian Nationalist remembers that, "My grandmother was the first Black Revolutionary I ever knew. During the War, when everyone was prickin' those little red buttons on the plastic bag that changed the color of that lard-like stuff to make margarine—well, we didn't have that, cause my grandmother stole butter from the crackers. She did a number of other things like half doing the cleaning, scorching the clothes, half cleanin the vegetables, breakin the gall of the liver of the chicken." This kind of domestic action is not new. Been going on since slavery.”
― Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae