Agitation Quotes

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation. (Michel de Montaigne)
The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences from social ostracism to vocational defenestration upon those who refuse to be silenced. View quote
Charles Krauthammer
The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action. View quote
Graham Greene
The nearer we come to the full military suppression of the bourgeoisie, the more dangerous becomes to us the high flood of petty-bourgeois Anarchism. And the struggle against these elements cannot be waged with propaganda and agitation alone. ... The struggle must also be waged by applying force and compulsion. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. View quote
Frederick Douglass
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B.C.), and revolution began in Rome (133 B.C.); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure. View quote
Will Durant
Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation. View quote
Eugene V. Debs
Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism. View quote
Werner Herzog
Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil. View quote
Martin Luther King Jr.
Publicity, discussion, and agitation are necessary to accomplish any work of lasting benefit. (Robert M. La Follette Sr.)
Mind without agitation is meditation. Mind in the present moment is meditation. Mind that has no hesitation, no anticipation is meditation. Mind that has come back home, to the source, is meditation. Mind that becomes ‘‘no mind'' is meditation. View quote
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric. View quote
Osamu Dazai
Our material eye cannot see that a stupid chauvinism is driving us from one noisy, destructive, futile agitation to another. View quote
Anne Sullivan Macy
Indifference is harder to fight than hostility, and there is nothing that kills an agitation like having everybody admit that it is fundamentally right. View quote
Crystal Eastman
If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation. View quote
Johann Most
The Social-Democratic Federation took part in all the political and economic struggles of the English working class; it took pains to bring Socialist views home to them, not only through agitation and propaganda, but also by actions. View quote
Karl Radek
Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going, I have married my hands to perpetual agitation, I run, I run to the whistle of money. Money money money Water water water. View quote
Theodore Roethke
An hereditary chief, strictly limited, the right of war vested in the legislative body, a rigid economy of the public contributions, and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses, will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive. But the only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure. View quote
Thomas Jefferson
The consequences of the Ayatollah's blood-thirsty fiasco could be disastrous for the whole of Islam and particularly for Shiism. The systematic destruction, in the name of religion, of a state and a society which vigilantly safeguarded the peace, could have effects in this part of the world which would be disastrous for sincere believers of the Koran, and even for those who believe less wholeheartedly. The murderous megalomania and the agitation of Qom, combined with the miserable dictatorship of a handful of mollahs, are, I insist, all in direct contradiction with the essential principles of Islam. View quote
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish. (Sylvia Plath)
[Lloyd George] had a not too satisfactory interview with [Eamon de Valera] yesterday. ... After DeV. had read the terms he told [Lloyd George] he could not advise his people to accept them. 'Very well, Mr. DeV.', was [Lloyd George]'s answer, 'then there is only one thing more left for us to discuss'. 'What is that?', asked DeV. 'The time for the truce to come to an end', said [Lloyd George]. [Lloyd George] says DeV. went perfectly white, and had difficulty controlling his agitation. ... [Lloyd George] says that if they refuse there is only one thing to be done-to reconquer Ireland. View quote
David Lloyd George
A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political agitation is the organisation of comprehensive political exposure. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
Revolutionary Social-Democracy has always included the struggle for reforms as part of its activities. But it utilises "economic” agitation for the purpose of presenting to the government, not only demands for all sorts of measures, but also (and primarily) the demand that it cease to be an autocratic government. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
The Congress decisively rejects terrorism, i. e., the system of individual political assassinations, as being a method of political struggle which is most inexpedient at the present time, diverting the best forces from the urgent and imperatively necessary work of organisation and agitation, destroying contact between the revolutionaries and the masses of the revolutionary classes of the population, and spreading both among the revolutionaries themselves and the population in general utterly distorted ideas of the aims and methods of struggle against the autocracy. View quote
Vladimir Lenin