Top 100 Quotes About Riots
#1. I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#2. Riots happen because rationale is eclipsed by revenge.
Vinita Kinra
#3. If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vim and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better world for tomorrow.
William Allen White
#4. How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?
Claudia Rankine
#5. Our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#6. Just say anything without even caring if it is true. That is how riots start.
Colin Flaherty
#8. Civil movements and riots are as old as human civilization. Long before Twitter was created, mobilization of the discontented was mouth-to-mouth, or even by 'smoke signals' to gather the uprising against established political power.
Eduardo Paes
#9. I turned atheist in the '90s when India went through troubled times - communal riots, bomb blasts ... Mumbai, where I live, was badly affected. I blamed religion; also, extremists on both sides - right and left.
Amish Tripathi
#10. People talk about the 1960s in a nostalgic way, but to me it was terrifying. People were getting assassinated. There was Vietnam. There were race riots. It felt like everything was going to get blown up sky-high. It didn't feel like flower power. It felt like Armageddon.
Sam Shepard
#11. When people are voiceless, they will have temper tantrums like a child who has not been paid attention to. And riots are massive temper tantrums from a neglected and voiceless people.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#12. Today I write,
riots with insite!
Tomorrow I read,
take the lead!
Sometimes I sleep, health to keep!
But for now I write,
and got no gripe!
Leslie Austin
#13. We should've
thrown fucking riots
the first time they
had us ring up
and bag our own
groceries
Phil Volatile
#14. Hollywood and Disneyland are the legacy of Europe's cultural imperialism. We gave them nursery rhymes and they gave back film. Televised riots are as American as Barbie/ Big Macs. Tomorrow the riots will be forgotten but Mickey mouse will still be there. Welcome to Disneyland.
Richey Edwards
#15. Two years before, when the riots started, the media had had a field day, but now people discussed them less and less ... in fact the media's attitude had changed over the last few months. No one talked about violence in the banlieues or race riots anymore. That was all passed over in silence.
Michel Houellebecq
#16. Shopping and buying and getting and having comprise the Great American Addiction. No one is immune. When the underclass riots in this country they don't kill policemen and politicians, they steal merchandise. How embarrassing.
George Carlin
#17. The only riots were the people trying to get tickets.
John Guare
#18. I expect to see trade wars, foreign policy disasters, a few race riots, a decrease in personal liberty, higher taxes, higher inflation and probably, economic collapse. The silver lining is, secession will probably become more feasible.
Charley Reese
#19. I was this kid who never sat down. Nobody liked me? Well, I'd make sure they'd like me. I was the class clown, always doing crazy stuff and causing riots.
Bas Rutten
#20. Like an animal. As if people weren't animals. She tried to put a face on him. His eyes would betray the chaos of his heart, the riots that were exploding everywhere inside him. His eyes would be so black that they would shine blue in the sun.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#21. I'm not a regionalist. Both places have their pros and cons. And the cultural differences are slighter than they are made out to be. L.A. riots, N.Y. shops. Both are good for stress relief.
Kyp Malone
#22. Riots are started by the police and blamed on dissidents.
Marty Rubin
#23. Shootouts are not gunfights of honor, they're gang wars and racial riots.
Jessica Savitch
#24. The Los Angeles riots were not caused by the Rodney King verdict. The Los Angeles riots were caused by rioters.
Rush Limbaugh
#25. I don't cause riots, but I do cause confusion. People freeze when they spot me.
Tom Hanks
#26. To write a blues song
is to regiment riots
and pluck gems from graves.
Etheridge Knight
#27. No one wants to see self-destructive riots because there's no future in riots.
Jesse Jackson
#28. We had a lot of riots. We came under attack from many of the police departments. It certainly wasn't some publicity thing. I was afraid for many years. We couldn't play in LA for many years. A lot of people got very cynical.
Greg Ginn
#29. The only thing America respects is power and power concedes nothing. After the LA Riots, they tried to calm us down and nothing changed since.
Tupac Shakur
#30. If every major city in America went up in the flames of race riots tonight, how ready would you be?
Billy Roper
#31. I told the truth about the Miami life. It's a nice place to visit, but you don't want to live here. I lived through two major riots and three Category 5 hurricanes, I don't know if a lot of people could say that.
Trick Daddy
#32. The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win, and their participants know it.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#33. I was a journalist when I made 'I'm British But ... ' I'd seen how important the media was in terms of defining Indians - after the riots in the '80s, I was like, 'Oh my God!'
Gurinder Chadha
#34. The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#35. Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.
Robert McNamara
#36. We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots ad executions. We kill every time we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame.
Eberhard Arnold
#37. Active nonviolence of the brave puts to flight thieves, dacoits, murderers, and prepares an army of volunteers ready to sacrifice themselves in quelling riots, in extinguishing fires and feuds, and so on.
Mahatma Gandhi
#38. What I'm asking is will watching The Discovery
Channel with my young black boy instead
of the news coverage of the riot funerals riot arrests
riot nothing changes riots be enough to keep him
from harm?
Jennifer Givhan
#39. Where and when have riots and anarchy been provoked by wise measures? If the government had acted wisely, and if their measures had met the needs of the poor peasants, would there have been unrest among the peasant masses?
Vladimir Lenin
#40. She imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi's eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that riots do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized because the ruler is safe if the hungry ruled are killing one another.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#41. Even today, you can still see the empty lots that the riots left in their wake.
Niall Ferguson
#42. When the American people saw the LA riots and crowds of Blacks cheering O.J. Simpson (who was acquitted by the almost all Black jury), they received a peek into their future.
David Duke
#43. The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#44. Riots and comedy are but symptoms of the times, profoundly revealing. They betray the psychological tone, the deep uncertainties ... and the striving for something better, plus the fear that nothing would come of it all.
Frank Herbert
#45. Lee carried a tin lantern to light the way, for it was one of those clear early winter nights when the sky riots with stars and the earth seems doubly dark because of them.
John Steinbeck
#46. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets,
Chris Rock
#47. I've been in wars and in riots and hung out of many helicopters in the early days. And there's a detachment that happens when you look through the camera. You're looking for the shot.
Haskell Wexler
#48. There were history's gifts to my family-and if the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would now live a life of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill?
Malcolm Gladwell
#49. When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and the killing in L.A., my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.
Dan Quayle
#50. Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.
Jean Cocteau
#51. In the night, I am kept awake by the endless chatter of my inner self. I hear it speak softly of old hurts and fondly of past loves, while its demands and anxieties resound throughout me in multitudes.
I could be calm and composed all day long, but the moment it is dark, my mind riots.
Beau Taplin
#52. There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse.
Bob Cousy
#53. The authorities in Yorkshire have rounded up their rioters, and divided them into those to be charged with affray and manslaughter, and those to be indicted for murder and rape. Rape? Since when do food riots involve rape? But I forget, this is Yorkshire.530
Hilary Mantel
#54. Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.
Jay Griffiths
#55. There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#56. The recent riots in France demonstrate the problem European countries face where second and third generation immigrants still do not consider themselves French, German, or English.
Bobby Jindal
#57. Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'
Douglas Brinkley
#58. It doesn't follow that the riots mean permanent hostility toward him.
Frank Herbert
#59. There were times when there were riots in Africa, demonstrations against the IMF because of the policy advice they were giving, the conditionalities they were imposing, and the difficulties that arose out of the implementation of those conditionalities.
Jakaya Kikwete
#60. Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#61. I was kind of a weird kid in high school. I didn't have many friends in my age group because all they wanted to do was fight and have riots.
Keith Stanfield
#62. It's just about bein' yourself ... even when you're on the dole, it's about your leather jacket. Music is the last refuge of the working class, along with football ... in fact, gigs and riots are the only things left.
Pete Doherty
#63. When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.
John Boyd Orr
#64. I think my software is going to become so ubiquitous, so essential, that if it stops working, there will be riots.
Michael J. Saylor
#65. I've been through WTO riots in Seattle, massive earthquakes, major floods ... forest fires. I just try to be as even-keeled and calm as possible.
Gary Locke
#66. Riots born out of political issues aren't the same as those born out of personal greed.
Ross Kemp
#67. I don't know what goes on in the crowd. I've had them show up and throw beer cans at me. I caused riots in most of the major cities.
Lou Reed
#68. Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
Aleksandar Hemon
#69. Now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico; it's a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down; the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia; food riots in Africa.
Paddy Ashdown
#70. Not only was one cartoonist gunned down, but riots erupted around the world, resulting in the deaths of scores. No one could say toward what positive social end, yet free speech absolutists were unchastened.
Garry Trudeau
#71. We, the American people, clearly see the daunting forces we will undoubtedly face: terrorists, crime, drug gangs, the possibility of Euro-style debt riots, civil unrest or natural disaster.
Wayne LaPierre
#72. Who's responsible for the riots? The rioters!
Dan Quayle
#73. The most dangerous thing about student riots is that adults take them seriously.
Georges Pompidou
#74. I once had been in the middle of a mass chaos and terrible riots.
There, I witnessed how men were truly such as beasts unleashed.
Toba Beta
#75. I am guilty of believing that the human race can be humanized and enriched in every spiritual inference through the saner and more beneficent processes of peaceful persuasion applied to material problems rather than through wars, riots and bloodshed.
Eugene V. Debs
#76. The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.
William Allen White
#77. The 2011 riots in England, which left five dead and caused more than $300 million in property damage, were fueled by a generation of young Brits who grew up without ever hearing the word 'No.'
Bob Barr
#78. There are accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.
Victor Hugo
#80. An Associated Press report by Chicago-based reporter Sharon Cohen in May 1993 examined Christian fundamentalists and concluded that they were prone to 'riots, terrorism - and death.'
Ralph E. Reed Jr.
#81. The cause of the riots were the rioters
Dan Quayle
#82. Let us say boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#83. The Rebecca Riots by David Williams is an unassuming book, but its significance is universal. The book and its author determined my life; they made me want to be a historian of Wales and of the world.
Kenneth O. Morgan
#84. Silence prevailed everywhere, like the gloomy dumbness after the riots in the city.
Girdhar Joshi
#85. Already 2008 has proved a tumultuous year in terms of global perceptions of China, and there are still 59 days to go until the Beijing Olympics. The tragedy of the Sichuan earthquake followed hard on the heels of the riots in Tibet and the demonstrations surrounding the Olympic torch relay.
Martin Jacques
#86. Without financial literacy, divorce rates soar, families rupture, and women stay with abusive men for financial security. A lack of jobs contributes to riots and illegal activity. Name any situation and it goes back to money. We need to focus on poverty eradication.
John Hope Bryant
#87. The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.
Tom Hayden
#88. As a matter of fact student riots of one sort or another, protests against the order that is, kicks against college and university management indicate a healthy growth and a normal functioning of the academic mind.
William Allen White
#89. I stuck on the lunchtime news. More riots. Tedious now. Depressing. You ever read Thucycdides? I'll boil him down for you in one easy moral: intergenerational war is a very bad thing.
Adrian McKinty
#90. The riots were a turning point in Ben-Gurion's
Anita Shapira
#91. For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.
Frank Delaney
#92. I wouldn't attach too much importance to these student riots. I remember when I was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, I used to go out and riot occasionally.
John Foster Dulles
#94. I was told there would be riots in the streets, but there were no riots.
Paddy Ashdown
#95. Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
Emil Cioran
#96. In 1968, America was a wounded nation. The wounds were moral ones; the Vietnam War and three summers of inner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul, challenging Americans' belief that they were a uniquely noble and honorable people.
Thurston Clarke
#97. I grew up in the American South and came of age in the 1960s, an incredibly turbulent time. It was as if the seams of American life were being ripped apart with riots and protests.
Sue Monk Kidd
#98. This is the most exciting place in the world to live. Oh yeah! There are so many ways to die in New York City! Race riots, drive by shootings, subway crashes, construction cranes collapsing on the sidewalks, manhole covers blowing up and asbestos shooting into the sky.
Denis Leary
#99. I want to see riots! I want to see the kind of riots where cab drivers are afraid to pick up white people! I want to see this guy!
Bill Maher
#100. How many of y'all wondered, like I did, during the LA riots when those people were being pulled out of their trucks and beaten half to death - step on the f***ing gas, man! They're on foot, you're in a truck - I think I see a way out of this.
Bill Hicks
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