#revolution

The secret of big and revolutionary actions also consists in discovering the tiny step that is simultaneously a strategic step, insofar as it entails additional steps in the direction of a better reality. ↗

— Gustav Heinemann

#additional #also #better #big #consists

I'm like, 'Would you be the person in the room that would boo when Dylan went electric? I know I wouldn't. Or are you the person that left The Beatles after 'She Loves You,' or 'Drive My Car?' You weren't on board for 'Revolution 9' or 'Day In The Life,' were you?' ↗

— Regina Spektor

#beatles #board #boo #car #day

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#anachronisms #death #permanence #revolution #sociology

The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#revolution #age

A collective insanity seemed to have seized the nation and turned them into something worse than beasts. The princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's intimate friend, was literally torn to pieces; her head, breasts, and pudenda were paraded on pikes before the windows of the Temple, where the royal family was imprisoned, while a man boasted drunkenly at a cafe that he had eaten the princess' heart, which he probably had. ↗

— J. Christopher Herold

#cannibalism #death #french-revolution #massacre #age

Madame Tallien shared honors with Josephine Beauharnais in being mistress to Barras, an ex-nobleman and ex-terrorist whose appetite for beautiful women, beautiful young men, and money was the only wholesome trait in his character. ↗

— J. Christopher Herold

#french-revolution #napoleon #age

Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded. ↗

— Paul Bowles

#age

Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also entails uncertainty, exhausting activity and upheaval of settled habits. Youth is substantially better off: it is not burdened by guilt, and the revolution can accept young people in toto. The uncertainty of revolutionary times is an advantage for youth, because it is the world of the fathers that is challenged. How exciting to enter into the age of maturity over the shattered ramparts of the adult world! ↗

— Milan Kundera

#youth #age

Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent. ↗

— Robert Hughes

#artists #creativity #dissent #failure #revolution

Beautiful people don't need coats. They've got their auras to keep them warm. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#jennifer-donnelly #revolution #urban #beauty