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 »
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 »
I am no book larnt man, but there is few who can beat me swapping horses or guessing at the weight of a bar. I have come here beca...use my people voted for me, knowing I was a honest man and could make as good whiskey and apple brandy at my still as any man.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 »
... this I conceive to be no time to prate of moral influences. Our men's nerves require their accustomed narcotics and a glass of... whiskey is a powerful friend in a sunstroke, and these poor fellows fall senseless on their heavy drills.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »