Douglas Alexander Quotes

There's a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn't have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

If civil disobedience is the way to go about change, than I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco

You know, Jesse Jackson is just trying to stir up a hornet's nest.

At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this. It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.

When you sign on to be an activist in northwest Montana, people in the grocery store will avoid eye contact, particularly if they're hanging out with outspoken opponents to your views.

I love being down at Occupy Wall Street. The sincerity, the youth involvement, the desire for better, is palpable and moving. There is true caring, sharing, and refreshingly naive hope.

I grew up in a very political household. My mum used to shout at the television. At Mrs. Thatcher.

My entire life, socially, was all around the Maggie era. That was the great challenge as a Sex Pistol was how to deal with Margaret Thatcher. I think we did rather good.

Under Thatcher, who ruled us with an iron rod, great art was made. Amazing designers and musicians. Acid house was born. Very colourful and progressive.

I mean it's easier to be in a demonstration if it's a trip that's one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart in 1971, because it wasn't a trip any longer.

In 1982, fellow film student Amanda Richardson and I went to Greenham Common for the day - to see what was going on and to shoot some video. The day turned into a weekend, the weekend into seven months, and the dozens of hours of footage turned into a film - 'Carry Greenham Home.'

We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.

I can call a march, and thousands come out, and I happen to have access to the White House at the same time.

Michael Ralph brilliantly plays the street prophet, a West Indian who foreshadows the Harlem riot.

It's very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.

I think the Occupy movement is absolutely fantastic; in my opinion, it's probably one of the most important people's movements of the 21st century and the 20th century. The trouble is that nobody really wants to support what they represent. They are too 'grassroots' for their own good.

Chicago '68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I've talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock.

A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything.

I have watched Occupy Wall Street mostly from the sidelines.

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

With these raids the backbone of the radical movement in America is broken.

To pass a big idea in this town. You almost need social unrest

We will have no political future if we are not arrested.

With each protest we all said to each other that we’ve got to keep the crazies in check. We didn’t do it, but the next time we said again, “we’ve got to keep the crazies in check.”

If any considerable number of citizens who are generally law abiding think that some particular statute is bad enough in itself or dangerous enough in its indirect effects to make it worthwhile to block its enforcement, they can do so.