From Hannah Arendt, _On Revolution_:
***** Revolutions always appear to succeed with amazing ease in their initial stage, and the reason is that the men who make them first only pick up the power of a regime in plain disintegration; they are the consequences but never the causes of the downfall of political authority.
From this, however, we are not entitled to conclude that revolutions always occur where government is incapable of commanding authority and the respect that goes with it. On the contrary, the curious and sometimes even weird longevity of obsolete bodies politic is a matter of historical record and was indeed an outstanding phenomenon of Western political history prior to the First World War. Even where the loss of authority is quite manifest, revolutions can break out and succeed only if there exists a sufficient number of men who are prepared for its collapse and, at the same time, willing to assume power, eager to organize and act together for a common purpose. The number of such men need not be great; ten men acting together, as Mirabeau once said, can make a hundred thousand tremble apart from each other.
(Hannah Arendt, _On Revolution_, 1963, p. 116) ***** -- Yoshie
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