Boots Riley Quotes

If officials are too forceful, people will revolt.

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.

In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority!

It is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

Government violence can only do one thing and that is to breed counter-violence.

I'm not afraid to say I'm at war with the pigs.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

You can bring down governments, you can do a lot of things that are in your own interests even though liberals will get very antsy when you start talking about it.

One, a mass movement from within, which, as you know, is constantly being put down brutally but which, again, regroups and moves forward as is happening right now as we are speaking.

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

Fight the power that be. Fight the power.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.

The seed of revolution is repression.

Unrest has its reasons.

Power abdicates only under stress of counter-power.

That which is given in submission becomes a medium of defiance.

It is authority that provokes revolution....

The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.

The oppressed have no alternative—for they have no power—but to fight.

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.