Rich Turner Quotes

… the unjust institutions which work so much misery and suffering to the masses have their root in governments, and owe their whole existence to the power derived from government.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.

I have a lot less faith in the system. You really don't understand how swampy it is until you get here.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it's easy to understand the inspiration for its anger as well as its impatience.

I swear to the Lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me.

This is why I hate governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by the fine print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.

The poor man … will be swayed by his sense of injury against the men who try to hold what they have improperly won… the most awful passions will be let loose.

Most people seem unaware that corporate influence and wealth has taken over public policy, such that government policy now favors the wealthy few at the expense of the people.

But after the spirit of conquest had changed the first governments, all the succeeding ones have, in general, proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost four thousand years.

The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Institutions are imperfect. Governments surely are. People are.

The business manager was doing fine back in his office while they were out on the line, hungry. And, so they started to see a lot of that and there was, that maybe the leadership had its own cause. More so than the miners, you know, it was like a power struggle.

I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?

Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you're on the front lines.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

The average member of the public thinks of 'business' as an impersonal corporate entity, owned by the very rich and managed by over-paid executives.

There is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of service institutions, would do better than the ‘bureaucrats’. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.

The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

Corporations gorged with profit ... menace the stability of society.

My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money,--the “spoils,” so called, “of office.” And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit the false good, and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks.