The word 'revolution' was originally an astronomical term which gained importance in the natural sciences through Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium...If used for the affairs of men on earth, it could only signify that the few known forms of government revolve among the mortals in eternal recurrence and with the same irresistible force which makes the stars follow their preordained paths in the skies. Nothing could be farther removed from the original meaning of the word 'revolution' than the idea of which all revolutionary actors have been possessed and obsessed, namely, that they are agents in a process which spells the definite end of an old order and brings about the birth of a new world.

— On revolution by Hannah Arendt (Penguin twentieth-century classics) (Page 42)