Revolutionary literature

“ We have tried to visualize the revolutionary situation as described in the classical revolutionary literature, a situation where the majority of the working population engage in independent creative work as makers of history, a situation where the old centralized government gives way to the self government of the producers. ”

“ It results from what I have said, that French literature has not experienced any apparent injury from the revolutionary storm: it has only changed its direction and means: it has still remaining talents which have served their time, talents in their maturity, and talents in a state of probation, and of much promise.
Persons of reflection entertain great hopes from the violent shock given to men's minds by the revolution ”

“ Such a time of storm and stress, of revolution and evolution, is pretty certain, especially in a new country, if it bring forth literature at all, to bring forth such as is predominantly political in content, style, and purpose. The Revolutionary leaders who have left a large and permanent impress upon American literature were concerned chiefly with such weighty matters as the nature of the British constitution, the formulation of colonial rights, and the elaboration of schemes of government and administration ”

“ A truly revolutionary movement, one which is founded on a really new principle of thought, has never failed, at least in the long run, as any one who thinks deeply may, to his comfort, prove to himself from history. ”

“ The official orators of the Sesquicentennial will portray the revolutionary fathers as demigods, the revolution as a glorious vindication of the eternal rights of man, the institutions created as classless and eternal and unimprovable. ”

“ History is the history of class struggles. Revolution is the culmination of the class struggle; and history, accordingly, is equally a history of revolutions, of cataclysmic epochs when the antagonisms of the class struggle flare up into revolutionary and decisive action. ”

“ Here are 7,000,000 comrades in an organized, international, world-wide, revolutionary movement. Here is a tremendous human force. It must be reckoned with. Here is power. And here is romance -- romance so colossal that it seems to be beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. These revolutionists are swayed by great passion. They have a keen sense of personal right, much of reverence for humanity, but little reverence, if any at all, for the rule of the dead. ”

“ Could I wish humanity different Could I wish the people made of wood and stone, or that there be no justice in destiny or time?
There is danger in revolution if the revolutionary spirit is much more advanced than the intellectual, and moral qualities which alone can secure the success of a revolt. These intellectual and moral qualities—the skill to organize, the wisdom to control large undertakings, are not natural gifts but the results of experience. They are evolutionary products. ”

“ No, the revolutionary ideal is the negation of all trammels, change for the sake of change, a constant bubbling of the social caldron, so that no unit may remain long at the top, or long at the bottom, or long anywhere. ”

“ It is not as if the revolutionaries were the result of the newspapers; it is the newspapers which are the reflection of the revolutionaries; and until you can repress every revolutionary the spirit which finds its vent in these organs will exist. ”

“ I thought, on the contrary, that a revolutionary paper must be, above all, a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination of new forms of social life, the growing revolt against antiquated institutions. ”

“ But the objective revolutionary situation created by the war and ever gaining in depth and extension will inevitably create a revolutionary frame of mind; it also steels and enlightens all the best and most class conscious proletarians. ”

“ But, just as little, does it seem open to question that, neither the writhings of the dregs of the populace in their misery, nor the speculative demonstrations of the Philosophers, would have come to much, except for the revolutionary movement which had been going on ever since the beginning of the century. ”

“ We hope that just such a detailed and concrete exposition as this will bring the internal problems of the revolution, its requirements and difficulties, to the closer understanding of a reader who does not possess direct revolutionary experience, but who is interested in acquiring it. ”

“ At this day, by all the world, France is called Revolution; and henceforth this word revolution will be the name of civilization, until it can be replaced by the word harmony. I repeat it: do not seek elsewhere the starting-point and the birth-place of the literature of the nineteenth century. Yes, as many as there be of us, great and small, powerful and unknown, illustrious and obscure, in all our works good or bad, whatever they may be,—poems, dramas, romances, history, philosophy,—at the tribune of assemblies as before the crowds of the theatre, as in the meditation of solitudes ”

“ There is a wide diversity in social situations, from rock-ribbed stability, to entire communities teetering on the brink or plunging over the brink into the maelstrom of revolution. Such diverse situations have existed again and again during the 1750-1970 revolutionary epoch. 4. When a revolutionary situation develops, a revolutionary leader well-established in a community trembling on the brink of a revolutionary overturn may seize the reins of power and establish a regime founded on opposition principles, dedicated to another set of principles and practices. ”

“ The intensity and the direction of the social changes which radiate out from the climax of a revolutionary situation and the consequent, subsequent attempts at counter-revolution, are the outcome of active, purposive intervention by all of the social groups present at the center of revolutionary activity. ”

“ When the revolution which subverts the social and political state of an aristocratic people begins to penetrate into literature, it generally first manifests itself in the drama, and it always remains conspicuous there. ”

“ The revolutionary character of this period, then, pertains principally to the rapid movement of public opinion, and its action upon and through the Government. It finds its parallel in nearly every revolutionary event of modern times. A dominant power, the slaveholding aristocracy, long submitted to, attempts a glaring encroachment upon the rights of the most active and progressive element of society. The popular mind gradually rises to a clear perception and appreciation of the true nature of the conflict. ”

“ According to the theory of class consciousness, individuals or social classes are revolutionary if they adhere to revolutionary ideas, to revolutionary thought, to revolutionary ideology, to the program of the revolutionary organization. ”

“ People born into a rapidly changing society are often tempted and sometimes compelled to play significant roles in the revolutionary process. Unconsciously or consciously, unwilling and unwitting or deliberately and purposefully they are revolutionaries. ”

“ It seems to me we witnessed at the beginning of this session a classic technique, namely to use the general revolutionary symbols of our past to create psychological sympathy for a counterrevolution can be imposed upon the majority of the people. ”

“ The revolutionary spirit in this young and ardent section of the public was visibly on the decline, not from scepticism and apathy, but because other ideas and sentiments occupied its place in their hearts, and drove it out to make room for their own admission. ”

“ I know well enough that revolutionists in neutral countries are writing and proclaiming the ideas of the old International of the workers, protesting against this stand of which I write, and are dreaming of revolution after the war. ”

“ He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. ”

“ In silence, in darkness, but under the feet of each one of us, the revolution lives and works. It’s a wonderful, immeasurable trap, on the lid of which society performs its antics. When once the machinery is complete there will be a great rehearsal. ”

“ Socialist and revolutionary propaganda are secretly circulated among these stupefied folk, and much of the narrative is taken up with the difficulties of accomplishing this distribution; for the whole book itself is nothing but a revolutionary tract. ”

“ But you say we are revolutionists. Well, if we are, who made us such? Are not the labor exploiters, the monopolists, the mine, factory and workshop czars creating a revolution? They are the revolutionists. ”

“ In which light it is that I recognise, and even to elation, how little, practically, of the idea of the Revolution in the vulgar or violent sense was involved in his seeing so many things, in the whole social order about him, and in the interest of their being more or less immediately altered, as lamentably, and yet at the same time and under such a coloured light, as amusingly and illustratively, wrong—wrong, that is, with a blundering helpless human salience that kept criticism humorous, kept it, so to speak, sociable and almost "sympathetic" even when readiest. ”

“ The leaven of revolutionary ideas, which had leavened the whole lump in France, was still working quietly and less passionately in this country, and being less repressed, displayed itself in the last quarter of the eighteenth century in the form of a strong and brilliant opposition. ”

“ So far as the stage properties of the traditional revolution were concerned, plots, conspiracies, powder-smoke, blood and thunder, any one of the ten thousand squabbles in the mediaeval, Italian, and Flemish towns, furnishes far more material to the romancer or playwright than did the great Revolution in America. ”

“ This volume of America's foremost literary rebel and Anarchist propagandist contains a choice selection of her poems, essays, sociological discourses, sketches and stories, which have proved a source of great inspiration to the revolutionary movement during the last twenty years. ”

“ There is never a happy medium about it, nothing balanced or discriminating; everything is extreme, human emotion rising to the most intense collective utterance at the pangs of starvation, of murder, of oppression, of tyranny, at the joy of decisive action and of climbing the heights whence liberty and betterment can be seen streaking the horizon with hope. That is why the Revolution fascinates the ordinary reader more than perhaps any other period of history. ”

“ In these the Revolution is not only shown as having a character, a profile, but also is revealed as being a living thing, a vivid many-sided creature, betraying its character in a host of unexpected ways, flashing out in a thousand fresh surprises, in a multiplicity of manifestations. ”

“ Individual gestures of rebellion, independent creative acts, may become components of a revolutionary situation. Before determining whether or not they would then constitute a ladder for the rise to power of a revolutionary organization, we must determine the historical possibility of the mighty burst of creative activity which can lead to the death of the old and birth of the new. ”

“ And when the French revolution took place among a people long accustomed to lead the taste and opinions of the neighbouring nations, it seemed as a glorious light placed in the very centre of the civilized world, to dispel the last remains of Gothic darkness, and reveal to man the true principles of his social nature. ”

“ Our revolutions are brought about by the passions of creative minds taking advantage, for their own aggrandisement, of peculiar circumstances in our national progress. They are never called for by the great body of the nation. ”

“ Other histories of our Revolution had been written, embellished, and read; what could be produced more attractive than they? The exciting literature of the day, ranging in its intoxicating character from the gross pictures of sensual life drawn by the French writers of fiction, to the more refined, but not less intoxicating works of popular and esteemed novelists, so cheaply published and so widely diffused, has produced a degree of mental dissipation throughout our land, destructive, in its tendency, to sober and rational desires for imbibing useful knowledge. ”

“ Without hating either royalty or Jacobinism, the little group of artists of plebeian birth and bourgeois manners suffered in silence the great revolution in which all their past went down, as the shadows of old age deepened on them. ”

“ The book, with its deep reading of human nature, its insistence on the continuity of national growth, and its contempt for those who thought to alter a political society by reasoning in the abstract, was the wisest book which the Revolution produced on either side. ”

“ More than any thing else do they illustrate that which can be properly called the History of our Revolution—and in so doing how vastly important do they appear to the entire cause of civil liberty? As the worthies of those great days are sinking, one by one, from among us, the value of what is known about them, and especially of what may be known through their memories, is increasing in a rapidly augmenting ratio. ”

“ Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years' security, and the still unanimating repose of public prosperity. The preacher found them all in the French Revolution. ”