Nazim Hikmet Quotes

What a great time to be born! What a great time to be alive! Because this generation gets to essentially completely change the world.

If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.

We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Technology makes the world a new place.

Reform is China's second revolution.

A new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant past, however refined or enticingly repackaged.

The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world.

We live in a quickly changing world, therefore we must foretell developments, and reforms should respond to these changes

Russia was the last to leave the 19th century and the most rapid to enter the mandates of the 20th century. It was not an evolution. It was not a slow process.

We are going to inherit the earth . There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We Are not afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the prairies and built the cities can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.

I wanted to revolutionise habits and contemporary life - to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism... I felt a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine.

The world around us is in a sea change, and I think the glory of art is that it cannot only survive change, it can lead it

Change always follows the same pattern. If you come up with something new they try and put you off.If that doesn't work they call you stark raving bonkers.If that doesn't work they lock you up like the suffragettes.Then, after a pause, the change happensand you can't find anyone that doesn't claim to have been fighting for it with you.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

You have to make change.

Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

And since we are people of expectation, we are so convinced that another world is coming that we start living as if it were already here.

Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born.

Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

What matters is not to know the world but to change it.

All progress means war with society.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.