“It sounded like walls tumbling, liberty bells chiming, government buildings being stormed. It sounded like a revolution. It sounded like hope.”
“Beautiful people don t need coats. They ve got their auras keeping them warm.”
“Identifying who began something like this is like picking out the stone that began an avalanche. It began somewhere, true enough [...] but once it well and truly begins, we are all just stones moving together. One stone rolling down a mountain changes nothing unless others move with it.”
“Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.”
“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.”
“Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government.”
“It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves Government! The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy. It has been going on for years, I said. And it only occurred to relatively few to disobey and make what they call revolutions. If they won their revolutions, which they occasionally did, they made more governments, sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last. Men are very difficult to understand, said Carmella. Let s hope they all freeze to death. I am sure it would be very pleasant and healthy for human beings to have no authority whatever. They would have to think for themselves, instead of always being told what to do and think by advertisements, cinemas, policemen, and parliaments.”
“Grease the guillotine with the fat of tyrants. Pull the concubine out of the clergyman`s bed. Monarch`s blood must flow, as thick as our boots. From there the free republic will rise.”
“I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success.”
“In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate them.”
“Every moment is a fresh new beginning, a wonderful inauguration of the great cosmic journey through the universe. We can do whatever we want. We can change reality at any moment.”
“The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing. It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say?”
“أعددت قائمة سوداء بكل من تعامل مع هذا النظام خلال 18 يوماً من أعظم أيام جيلنا، بل ومن أعظم أيام العصر الحديث، تعاملوا مع النظام القديم واساؤا إلينا وإلى ثورتنا وقاموا بإهانتنا (...) هذه القائمة التي رحت أعدها لحظة بلحظة طوال الأيام الثمانية عشر التي أشعلنا فيها ثورتنا.. قمت بحذفها منذ دقائق، لإيماني العميق بأن الساعي إلى الحرية لا يقوم بتنصيب محاكم التفتيش للآخرين ولا يسعى إلى تصفية حسابات مع البعض سواء يعرفهم بشكل شخصي أو تضرر منهم في الإطار العام، وأن وصم البعض بآرائهم هو فعل ينتمي إلى نظام حسني مبارك بامتياز ويجب ألا نسمح لأفعال هذا النظام بالتسرب مجدداً لتلوث روحنا التي تطهرت بوهج ثورتنا العظيمة.”
“We seek to uncover behind the events changes in the collective consciousness. We reject wholesale references to the “spontaneity” of the movement, references which in most cases explain nothing and teach nobody. Revolutions take place according to certain laws. This does not mean that the masses in action are aware of the laws of revolution, but it does mean that the changes in mass consciousness are not accidental, but are subject to an objective necessity which is capable of theoretic explanation, and thus makes both prophecy and leadership possible.”
“Let us be today’s Christians. Let us not take fright at the boldness of today’s church. With Christ’s light let us illuminate even the most hideous caverns of the human person: torture, jail, plunder, want, chronic illness. The oppressed must be saved, not with a revolutionary salvation, in mere human fashion, but with the holy revolution of the Son of Man, who dies on the cross to cleanse God’s image, which is soiled in today’s humanity, a humanity so enslaved, so selfish, so sinful.”
“Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.”
“If your regime is not strong enough to handle a joke, then you have no regime.”