Status Updates From The Anatomy of Revolution

"We may suggest in very tentative and hypothetical form the generalization that no government has ever fallen before revolutionists until it has lost control over its armed forces or lost the ability to use them effectively."

"We note that in our prerevolutionary societies ... the specific difficulties about economic, social, and political conditions that hardboiled moderns focus on are invariably accompanied by a very great deal of writing and talking about ideals, about a better world, about some very abstract forces tending to bring about that better world."

"The inevitable march of economic forces would then for the Marxists accomplish what the English Puritan expected from God and the French philosophe from nature and reason. The essential thing all these prerevolutionary agitators have in common [...], at least, in the revolutionary myth, is this abstract, all-powerful force, this perfect ally."

"What differentiates this ideal world of our revolutionaries from the better world as conceived by more pedestrian persons is a flaming sense of the immediacy of the ideal, a feeling that there is something in all men better than their present fate, and a conviction that what is, not only ought not, but need not, be."

"To what did our successfully revolutionary intellectuals desert? To another and better world than that of the corrupt and inefficient old regimes."

Re 20th century American intellectuals: "... the United States does not seem in this century ripe for revolution... Yet there is a bitterness in many American writers, a sense of being out of things in a country run by nonintellectual businessmen, which one does not quite feel even in the Matthew Arnolds [etc]."

"The prerevolutionary decades in our four societies do show, however, an intensity of action on the part of pressure groups, an action more and more directed as time goes on toward the radical alteration of existing government."

"What is really but a restraint on a rising and already successful group, or on several such groups, must appear as rank injustice toward everyone in the society."

"'The mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it was, the masses would always be in revolt.'

Of much greater importance is the existence among a group, or groups, of a feeling that prevailing conditions limit or hinder their economic activity."