If We Burn Quotes

“We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“But if you refuse to use the tools that work, you are not really building; you are refusing to take responsibility, and you are ceding your power to other people.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“century ago, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin apparently said that “there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“You can get yourself all fucked up on revolutionary élan, just like you can drink alcohol or take drugs. But it warps your senses and causes you to make poor decisions. It isn’t real, and you’re going to pay for it later. If you want the feeling of mass ecstasy you should go to a music festival instead of encouraging vulnerable young people to go out and get killed.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“If you cannot carry out a revolution and are not in a position to negotiate reforms, then perhaps it is acceptable to do nothing at all. Better yet, to organize, analyze, and strategize—to put yourself in the best position for the next opportunity.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“In the history of revolutions, a couple of truisms had already emerged. One is that they are only successful when security forces defect or are defeated in violent conflict. Even if Moa Zedong was being a bit proactive when he said that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” experts agree that he is not so far off. You can’t run a country if the biggest army around wants to stop you. Another is that revolutionary opportunities often arise when there are divisions in the ruling class–that is, when elites are fighting amongst themselves. And one more truism is that revolutions are contagious; at least, uprisings tend to cluster around certain moments in time.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“On the one hand, the so-called Arab Spring took place in opposition to neoliberal policies, but it also took place in a society shaped by neoliberal subjectivity. It was carried out by individuals with a certain way of looking at the world. “The Arab revolutions lacked the kind of radicalism—in political and economic outlook—that marked most other twentieth-century revolutions,” he wrote in his book Revolution Without Revolutionaries. “Unlike the revolutions of the 1970s that espoused a powerful socialist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and social justice impulse, Arab revolutionaries were preoccupied more with the broad issues of human rights, political accountability, and legal reform. The prevailing voices, secular and Islamist alike, took free market, property relations, and neoliberal rationality for granted.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“TWITTER HAD ROOTS IN THE alter-globalization movement. The anarchist Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the engineers who created the “micro-blogging” social network, had been a software developer for Indymedia. Back in the late 1990s, he helped build a “status update” newswire on the top of Indymedia’s web page in order to keep readers abreast of what was going on—mostly where the cops were and what they were doing—during protests. Then they developed a way to send these out en masse via text message. This eventually grew into Twitter, launched in 2006.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“If you want to help people, if your goal is to confront the problems facing humanity, that means a focus on ends, and it means constructing a movement that can stand the test of time, in addition to remaining democratic and accountable.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“the classic solution—construct a self-consciously democratic organization that ensures this happens in the most legitimate and transparent ways possible.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“At its most basic level, a protest says, “I don’t like this—you fix it.” As history shows,the mass protest only came together, piece by piece, in the era of mass communications.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“Perhaps sometimes, at a really granular level, we were really protesting our phones.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution