Bille August Quotes

Hope and Change has become Divide and Conquer.

The position of what is generally called great people has of late become extremely difficult. They are more attacked and calumniated, and judged with less indulgence than private individuals. What they have lost in this way, they have not by any means regained in any other. Ever since the revolution of 1790 they are much less secure than they used to be, and the transition from sovereign power to absolute want has been as frequent as sudden.

Every 20 years or so, I feel that young people confront the same issues - a new war, new challenges.

The modern world is one wherein every nation has to develop the strength of which its citizens are capable. The independent status of the individual, his thoughts and actions become a thing of the past.

People tend to believe that to be modern you have to disengage from your heritage, but it's not true.

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

I think all of us thought that by the '70s, at the latest the '80s, all the world's problems would be solved and everyone would be getting along fine. And instead we saw that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Robert F. Kennedy died. We saw that it was going to be a lot more difficult than I think we had thought.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

The world is very different today than it was in 1968.

There's a battle outside raging It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls for the times they are a-changing.

It’s the confrontation with modernity that produces terrorism.

I fear that some day or another we shall have in Europe a total upsetting of social order, which will drive all wise and experienced men to America.

Two things are from now on impossible in France: revolution and war.

We are living in the jet-age, but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality.

We have reached a crises in the history of this country when no man, however humble his rank or limited his influence, has a right to stand neutral..

Without banging a drum or getting on a soap box, there are always ebbs and tides in this country in terms of the political and social climate that we might be dealing with at any given moment.

I remember being in Washington for high school when the city was on fire and those were troubling times, the Vietnam War, the protests.

The pressure in Brazil is a little complicated, a little menacing.

Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

It's going to be a combination Scopes trial, revolution in the streets, Woodstock Festival and People's Park, all rolled into one.

Many who have nothing opposed to the few who have everything, and as long as these disparities remain, as long as these distances remain between people and forces, I think we'll be in a perpetual state of upheaval.

This country's going to have a revolution if something doesn't happen the haves and have - nots.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

All of this strife on the political front might just be the death throes of another set of [less-honorable] American beliefs, that have, at their core, the notion that equality is something the privileged group "gives" to those not so privileged - a reaching down, as it were.