Failed Revolution Quotes

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it turns out to be not what they meant, other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

Hungary was the only Central European country that was not able to create a new constitution after the collapse of the communist regime.

Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.

I fought a long battle for Punjab but it could not succeed because the intentions of the people along with whom I was fighting were not clean.

I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing.

Revolutions rarely end up as positively as they begin.

Nothing's gonna change the world, nothing's gonna change the world. There was Lennon and a happy gun, there were words on the pavement.

I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.

A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal.

The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured.

Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed.

The Bolivarian revolution has no future and it has shown a lack of results.

I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.

Yeltsin was admirable but flawed, noble but tainted, but in his own negligent grandeur, he undermined his own real achievements - and accelerated their ruin.

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.

The public always tires of its messiahs, and soon or late invariably turns them out, whether they be good, which is uncommon, or bad, which is the rule.

I couldn't think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.

I thought that punk in its original state was a revolutionary movement. But like surrealism, it failed in its revolutionary attempt.

How could liberty ever establish itself amongst us? Apart from a few tragic scenes, the revolution has been nothing but a web of farcical scenes.

Yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake it in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.

It all started off with stirring speeches, Greek columns, the thrill of something new. Now all that's left is a presidency adrift, surviving on slogans that already seem tired, grasping at a moment that has already passed, like a ship trying to sail on yesterday's wind.