I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physica...l.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patri...ots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The warning given to Louis XVI: "No, sire, this is not a rebellion, it is a revolution," accents the essential difference. It mean...s precisely that "it is the absolute certainty of a new form of government." Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement. Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas. Specifically, it is the injection of ideas into historical experience, while rebellion is only the movement that leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas. While even the collective history of a movement of rebellion is always that of a fruitless struggle with facts, of an obscure protest which involves neither methods nor reasons, a revolution is an attempt to shape action to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame. That is why rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of cons...ent and not of rebellion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper o...f a new rule.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of ali...enation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There being in the make of an English mind a certain gloom and eagerness, which carries to the sad extreme; religion to fanaticism...; free-thinking to atheism; liberty to rebellion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... not only have we exploited them physically and economically to bring ease to our bodies and our purses, but also we have explo...ited them emotionally to bring us many sublimated satisfactions. Our relationship with Negroes is a many-stringed instrument upon which we play melodies to replenish all the empty places in our hearts.... The parent-child relationship is almost consciously acted out, with the obedience, seeming respect, and acceptance by "our Nigras" going far toward soothing heartaches for the rebellion, arrogance, and rejection we must endure as our real children seize their own lives from us in adolescence. Even the reverse, the child-parent role, is sometimes filled, as we play the part of babyhood helplessness, satisfying immature longings to be waited on and taken care of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »