Volume 13, Issue 6: Verbatim

Quotations on Revolution

People, Good and Bad

The French Revolution was an insurrection of mules and horses against men, conducted by apes with the throats of parrots.

Progress is the process whereby the human race is getting rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God.

What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.

A revolutionary state must foster immorality among its citizens if it wants to foster the perpetual unrest necessary to foment revolution. Morals meant the advent of tranquillity, and tranquillity meant the end of revolutionary fervor. Therefore, the state must promote immorality. Given man's natural and inordinate inclination to pleasure, the immorality most congenial to manipulation is sexual immorality. Hence the revolutionary state must promote sexual license if it is to remain truly revolutionary and retain its hold on power.

It cannot be too often said that society and mass are contradictory terms and that those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

An important element of each of the great revolutions of Western history was its apocalyptic vision of the future. Each was more than a political program, more even than a passionate struggle to reform the world. Each also represented a belief in, and a commitment to, an eschatology—a messianic dream of an end-time, a conviction that history was moving to a final denouement. In the case of the Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, and the Puritan revolutions, the eschatology was expressed in biblical terms. The Christian revolutionaries foresaw "a new heaven and a new earth." They envisioned the fulfillment of the prophecy of a thousand years of peace on earth. . . . In the case of the American, French, and Russian revolutions, the escahtaology was a secular one: a new and final era of freedom and equality, the end of man's long history of oppression, the dawn of a just society.

To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from,

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

Revolution may be a good deed, but it is a bad habit.

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