Rioting Quotes

“When people have no political outlet nor means of changing a racist society, rioting is their only voice.”
― Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

“I wish I had something reassuring to tell you, but I don’t. It’s not safe out there. People are rioting and looting. There’s no telling what could happen to you, if you went out there. We need to play this safe.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“It’s complete madness! There are cars on fire, shops being looted by teenagers, people rioting and protesting over something they have no control over. And these are people that haven’t even had to deal with the infected, yet! They’re destroying their neighborhoods like savages, instead of preparing for the hell that’s about to hit them like a tsunami! Mark my words, when the infection reaches this area, they are all going to be infected within the first hour because they are not prepared to defend themselves. They are too busy being stupid!”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“Two wrongs don't make a riot.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“So if black power means black armies racing through the streets, creating havoc, that certainly does nothing to advance the legitimate political and economic aspirations of the black community. Just the opposite, in fact....If they think a few Molotov cocktails are going to bring down the whole system and build something new, I'm afraid they're just indulging in wishful-thinking,”
― Truman Capote, Truman Capote: Conversations

“While serving one of his countless sentences of imprisonment, he was given ex-wrestler Paul as cell companion. Paul was at that time a dock worker; he was in jail for having, during a strike riot, remembered his professional past and applied the grip known as a double Nelson to a policeman. This grip consisted in passing one's arms through the opponent's arm­pits from behind, locking one's hands behind his neck,
and pressing his head down until the neck vertebra began to crack. In the ring this had always brought him considerable applause, but he had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“One effect of the civil rights struggle in the past ten years has been to convince a generation of young Negroes that their place in society is no longer predetermined at birth. We demonstrated that segregationist barriers could be toppled, that social relations were not fixed for all time, that change was on the agenda. The federal government reinforced this new consciousness with its many pronouncements that racial integration and equality were the official goals of American society.

The reactionaries would tell us that these hopes and promises were unreasonable to begin with and should never have been advanced. They equate stability with the preservation of the established hierarchy of social relations, and chaos with the reform of that unjust arrangement. The fact is that the promises were reasonable, justified, and long overdue. Our task is not to rescind them--how do you rescind the promise of equality?--but to implement them fully and vigorously.

This task is enormously complicated by the polarization now taking place on the race issue. We are caught in a vicious cycle: inaction on the poverty and civil rights fronts foments rioting in the ghettos; the rioting encourages vindictive inaction. Militancy, extremism, and violence grow in the black community; racism, reaction, and conservatism gain ground in the white community.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“The people who lived here hated it so much that they had burned down a lot of it a month before. It was all they had, and they'd wrecked it.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade

“A police officer is paid to be attacked by angry people.”
― Steven Magee

“A police officer is one of the most dangerous jobs a person can do.”
― Steven Magee

“To riot or not to riot, that is the question.”
― Steven Magee

“When people riot, there are generally much deeper reasons for the rioting than what is being reported by the corporate media.”
― Steven Magee

“To riot for equality or to riot for historic national identity, that is the question.”
― Steven Magee

“Based on the wide range of dangerous objects thrown at the police in the UK riots of 2024, I was surprised no one was killed!”
― Steven Magee

“To riot for better protection of children or to riot for all of the other toxic government issues, that is the question.”
― Steven Magee

“I followed along with Sky News and BBC News during the UK 2024 riots. The BBC News feed distinctly changed after it emerged the killer of the young girls was a BBC TV star. The Sky news feed distinctly changed after the rioting did not stop. After a week of watching both of them, I never trusted either news feed and started to get my news from social media. Both channels reported the Banksy police box artwork as ‘fish’ when they were flesh eating piranhas!”
― Steven Magee