“The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius - a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. A genius working alone, he says, is invariably ignored as a lunatic. The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find; a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. A person like this working alone, says Slazinger, can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shaped should be. The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting, says Slazinger. Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”
“Don t just survive while waiting for someone s revolution to clear your head.”
“إنه كان أحسن الأزمان وكان أسوأ الأزمان .. كان عصر الحكمة وكان عصر الجهالة .. كان عهد اليقين والإيمان وكان عهد الحيرة والشكوك .. كان أوان النور وكان أوان الظلام .. كان ربيع الرجاء وكان زمهرير القنوط .. بين أيدينا كل شيء وليس في أيدينا أي شيء .. وسبيلنا جميعا إلى سماء عليين، وسبيلنا جميعا إلى قرار الجحيم. تلك أيام كأيامنا هذه التي يوصينا الصاخبون من ثقاتها أن نأخذها على علاتها، والا نذكرها إلا بصيغة المبالغة فيما اشتملت عليه من طيبات ومن آفات // في زمن الثورة الفرنسية”
“The ones who close the path for peacefull revolution, at the same time open the path for violent revolution.”
“La revolución beneficia al pobre, al ignorante, al que toda su vida ha sido esclavo, a los infelices que ni siquiera saben que si lo son es porque el rico convierte en oro las lágrimas, el sudor y la sangre de los pobres. || The revolution benefits the poor, the ignorant, who all his life has been a slave, the unfortunate who do not know if they are is because the rich becomes the tears, sweat and blood of the poor in gold.”
“Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.”
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”
“He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. Of course there will be a revolution, he said. You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.”
“The revolution lasted six minutes and covered one hundred an twelve meters.”
“Everyone ate as a group, and a huge cauldron of dumpster-dived gruel bubbled over a campfire, tended by a grubby-handed group of chefs dicing potatoes and onions on a piece of cardboard on the ground. Huck [Finn] may have been right that a barrel of odds and ends where the juice kind of swaps around makes for better victuals, but it occurred to me that the revolution may well get dysentery.”
“Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, “Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.”
“Money won’t change you. Change will change you.”
“I don t have a life of my own. I ve put myself and my life at the service of the people. If necessity dictates I run, I run.. go to jail, I go to jail.. die, I die.My private aspirations are exactly the general aspirations of the people.”
“Every man who has in his soul a secret feeling of revolt against any act of the State, of life, or of destiny, is on the verge of riot; and so soon as it appears, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away by the whirlwind.”
“Egyptians are like camels: they can put up with beatings, humiliation and starvation for a long time but when they rebel they do so suddenly and with a force that is impossible to control.”
“Revolutionary man must be a contingent being, unjustifiable but free, entirely immersed in the society that oppresses him, but capable of transcending this society by his effort to change it. Idealism mystifies him in that it binds him by rights and values that are already given; it conceals from him his power to devise roads of his own. But materialism also mystifies him, by depriving him of his freedom. The revolutionary philosophy must be a philosophy of transcendence.”
“What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news. Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.”