Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood — one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror — that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Novel (1889), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Part 3 “The Tale of the Lost Land,” ch. 13 “Freemen”
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Quotations about:
uprising
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Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many — they are few.Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English poet
Poem (1819), “The Mask of Anarchy,” st. 38
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Writing as the voice of England talking to her children. The words are repeated in the final stanza.
The poem was subtitled "Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester," referring to the Peterloo Massacre (1819-08-16), when a large, peaceful demonstration for parliamentary representation by millworkers and their families was attacked by regular and irregular cavalry troops, attempting to arrest the protest leader, Henry Hunt, and break up the assembly. Hundreds were wounded, and around a dozen killed.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, civil rights leader, social activist, preacher
“The Other America,” speech, Stanford University (14 Apr 1967)
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