Public Protest Quotes & Sayings

The world gives us PLENTY of opportunities to strengthen our patience. While this truth can definitely be challenging, this is a good thing. Patience is a key that unlocks the door to a more fulfilling life. It is through a cultivation of patience that we become better parents, powerful teachers, great businessmen, good friends, and a live a happier life. — Steve Maraboli

And public transportation applied economic pressure. Freedom Riders - African Americans and whites - took bus trips throughout the South to test federal laws that banned segregation in interstate transportation. Black students had enrolled in segregated schools such as Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the University of Alabama. Picketing, protest marches, and demonstrations made headlines. Civil rights workers carried out programs for voter education and registration. The goal was — Christopher Paul Curtis

I feel greatly at fault in not having made a loud public protest about Belle Glade before this. — Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Looking back on that time it seems to me that such rapture over Tarkovsky by an audience most of whom would not have known how to spell his name, and who would under normal circumstances have ignored or even disliked his work, arose from our intense sensory deprivation. We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution. — Azar Nafisi

My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly. — Joan Baez

When a man's trust is violated, he will leave even his friend. Hey, you shouldn't leave him! There is the energy of the absolute Self within and if the knowledge of the Self is attained, one may even attain the state of the absolute-Self! — Dada Bhagwan

An interlocking set of new enemies was emerging: globalization, foreigners, multiculturalism, environmental regulation, high taxes, and the incompetent politicians who could not cope with these challenges. A widening public disaffection for the political Establishment opened the way for an "antipolitics" that the extreme Right could satisfy better than the far Left after 1989. After the Marxist Left lost credibility as a plausible protest vehicle when the Soviet Union collapsed, the radical Right had no serious rivals as the mouthpiece for the angry "losers" of the new postindustrial, globalized, multiethnic Europe. — Robert O. Paxton

Between now and when we graduate next year there are at least ten weeks' holiday and five random public holidays. There's email and if you manage to get down to the town, there's text messaging and mobile phone calls. If not, the five minutes you get to speak to me on your communal phone is better than nothing. There are the chess nerds who want to invite you to our school for the chess comp next March and there's this town in the middle, planned by Walter Burley Griffin, where we can meet up and protest against our government's refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty. — Melina Marchetta

It's true, that in concrete battles the tyrants may have the upper hand in terms of tactics, weapons, ruthlessness. What our means of protest attempt to do is to move the battles towards abstract space. Force tyranny to defend itself in language. Weaken it with public opinion, with supreme court judgements, with debates and subversive curriculum. Take hold of the media, take hold of the printing presses and the newspapers, broadcast your views from pirate radio channels, spread the word. Don't do anything less than all you are capable of, and remember that history outlives you. It may not be until your grandchildren's days that they'll point back and say, there were sown the seeds of what we've now achieved. — Kamila Shamsie

If a determined, disciplined gang of statists were to make an assault on the crumbling remnants of a mixed economy, boldly and explicitly proclaiming the collectivist tenets which the country had accepted by tacit default - what resistance would they encounter? The dispirited, demoralized, embittered majority would remain lethargically indifferent to any public event. And many would support the gang, at first, moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out somehow at the suffocating hopelessness of the status quo. — Ayn Rand

We will continue to go out onto the streets and to protest, and actively encourage the public to support us in our campaign for free education, — Joe Hockey

The American public has become so conditioned by crises, by warnings, by words, that there are few, other than the young, who protest against what is happening. — J. William Fulbright

Whenever I organize or participate in public protest I get really worried that it will just suck, be really small, embarrassing, and the media will laugh at me. Oftentimes, it is really small and most of the time the media laughs at us. — Rachel Corrie

Self-love and the love of the world constitute hell. — Emanuel Swedenborg

She jotted down the order, then forced herself to meet his gaze. "It's going to be a bit of a wait, we're short-staffed this morning." The following words rushed out of her. "And breakfast's on me."
"Normally, I wouldn't protest," he said, leaning closer. "But in public, I'd prefer a plate."
An image of Rukh, hair untied, licking whipped cream off her navel flashed through her mind, left her staring. — Mina Khan

Let us remember we are all part of one American family. We are united in common values, and that includes belief in equality under the law, basic respect for public order, and the right of peaceful protest. — Barack Obama

The Tower of Babel" ...
The undersigned citizens, being artists, painters, sculptors, architects, and others devoted to and desirous preserving the amenities of Paris, wish to protest, in the name of our national good taste, against such an erection in the very heart of our city, as the monstrous and useless Eiffel Tower, already christened ... " The Tower of Babel" ...
How much longer is the City of Paris to be a play-ground for these barbarous and sordid imaginations which disfigure and dishonor her? For the Eiffel Tower, which even commercially minded America rejected, is a public dishonor to our city. All our historic buildings, our monuments of rare and appealing beauty, are dwarfed and humiliated by this monstrous apotheosis of the factory chimney whose odious shadow will lie over the city ...
Plea to the Exposition Director in opposition to the Eiffel Tower, signed by artists and writers and published in Le Temps, 1887 — Carol McCleary

I detect the activist returning with a vengence. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Come. I was on my way to the park; I know a quiet spot where you can sit down."
"In public? With a servant?" I protest as he starts to draw me down the street.
"What is the point of being the duke's heir if I can't cause a scandal now and then? — Rosamund Hodge

An artist, if he's unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Improv Everywhere tramples the lines drawn between spectacle and spectator, theatre and real life, public and private, performance and protest, and reclaims the streets for ordinary people. — Lyn Gardner

A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with. I would rather go before the government with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied.
But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living. — Wendell Berry

Thousands upon thousands of government employees take to the streets to protest the bill. Here is Greece's version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don't really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies. — Michael Lewis

Common sense, however it tries,
cannot avoid being surprised from time to time. — Bertrand Russell

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence. — Wendell Berry

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution...For a brief time we experienced collectively the kind of awful beauty that can only be grasped at through extreme anguish and expressed through art. — Azar Nafisi

This wasn't just an attack against the Boston Marathon ... It was an attack against the American public and our democratic use of the streets. We have used our public roadways for annual parades, protest marches, presidential inaugurations, marathons, and all manner of other events. The roads belong to us, and their use represents an important part of our free and democratic tradition. — Amby Burfoot

It's pretty simple, really, when you think about it: We all start out as little fishes in our daddy's pants, and we all end up a Thanksgiving feast for the worms, and in the meantime we have to find a couple good reasons to give a fuck. — Tiffanie DeBartolo