When people contend for their liberty they seldom get anything for their victory, but new masters.
Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Plots, true or false, are necessary things, to raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.
On the first day of a revolution he is a treasure; on the second he ought to be shot.
I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.
True revolutionaries are like God -- they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.
A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.
A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.
You said, ''They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people.'' -- ''What,'' I asked you, ''is harmless about a dreamer, and what,'' I asked you, ''is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.''
A nation grown free in a single day is a child born with the limbs and the vigor of a man, who would take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a blaze that he might chuckle over the splendor.
Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.