Ows Quotes & Sayings

Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power, we gain freedom from personal responsibility for what we do and are forced to do - the seduction of it - but we lose the dignity of being real men and women. Power corrupts; attracts the worst and corrupts the best ... Refuse to participate in evil; insist on taking part in what is healthy, generous, and responsible. Stand up, speak out, and when necessary fight back. Get down off the fence and lend a hand, grab a-hold, be a citizen - not a subject. — Edward Abbey

I keep saying I am an auto-didact, but I have a lot of outside influences. One I could cite is juggler Francis Brunn, who was the first man to throw ten rings in the air; he was really an amazing juggler who showed onstage the quest for perfection. — Philippe Petit

So far, the only major accomplishment of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters is that they have finally put an end to their previous initiative, Occupy Our Mothers' Basements. — Ann Coulter

It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like. — Victor Hugo

There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk -to believe, and to risk everything for your belief. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

I love playing an alien. — Sigourney Weaver

The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time ... Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The world always looks brighter from behind a smile." ~Author Unknown — Fiona Childs

It is the child who makes the man, and no man exists who was not made by the child he once was. — Maria Montessori

And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests. — Edward Abbey

The foundation of any and every civilization, including our own, is private ownership of the means of production. Whoever wishes to criticize modern civilization, therefore, begins with private property. — Ludwig Von Mises

But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable. — Kazuo Ishiguro

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. — Rutherford B. Hayes

I have no regrets because I did everything by the book. — Alexis Arguello

Do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not, "Main Street, not Wall Street," but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. — Slavoj Zizek

We are, each of us, hopeless hopers. — David Arnold

The question may be asked, off the record, why time doesn't pass, from you, why it piles up all about you, instant on instant, on all sides, deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, other's time, the time of the ancient dead and the dead yet unborn, why it buries you grain by grain neither dead nor alive, with no memory of anything, no hope of anything, no knowledge of anything, no history and no prospects, buried under the seconds ... — Samuel Beckett

Now, these eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one. — Alexis De Tocqueville

One of the most curious features of the age of plenty that ended with the Fist World War was the terror which rich people felt about their continued possession of their wealth. SO when she came to see us it was very terrible. Most adults are rude to children, and many rich people are rude to the poor. We were children, we were poor so we were victims of a double assault; and though we were bigger than we were we were still small, and she was very big. — Rebecca West

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic. — Dennis Lehane

My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics. — Todd Gitlin

Critics say the OWS protesters hate the rich. Come on! Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning - they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more. — Matt Taibbi