On Literature: On Revolutions (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary; most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death."  (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers; the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law - like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy)." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"The art of war is simplicity itself compared with the art of revolution. War follows well-defined principles, and analogies may be traced down through the centuries, whether the fighting is done with pilum and ballista, or with rocket and disintegrator; but each revolution is a law unto itself, a freak, a monstrosity, whose conditions may not be repeated." (Robert A Heinlein, "If This Goes On", 1940)

"Revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications." (Robert A Heinlein, "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress", 1966)

"Only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice - the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind." (Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere." (Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"Revolutions begin in the universities; the streets breed only riots." (George Turner, "Drowning Towers", 1987)

"If these aging treatments work, and we are living decades longer than previously, it will certainly cause a social revolution. Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it." (Kim S Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

"Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes." (Terry Pratchett, "Night Watch", 2002)