W. S. Merwin Quotes

The so called “Arab Spring” … is really a situation which is creating more threats so far than positive incentives.

The Arab Awakening or Arab Spring has transformed the geopolitical landscape.

As you know with the Arab Spring, there were no dividends.

Revolts, republics, revolutions, most no graver than a schoolboy’s barring out.

Revolution is always delightful in the preliminary stages. So long as it's a question of getting rid of the people at the top.

An armed uprising is inevitable and the time for it fully ripe.

In a democracy, when you have 20 million people in the street, you resign. Unfortunately, we don’t have a process of recall or impeachment as you have. It was a popular uprising rejecting Mr. Morsi’s continuing in power. Unfortunately, people had to call on the army to intervene. The army had to intervene because short of that, we would have ended up in a civil war.

Rebellions broke out, from the full-scale political revolution of Dorr’s rebellion in Rhode Island to urban violence and protest, often by out of work whites taking out their anger on African Americans or Irish Americans. In response, leaders had to come to terms with the role of force in a democracy.

It is hard to know exactly when the Arab Spring, a phrase used to describe the beginning of the Arab peoples' demand for democracy and human-rights reform, started.

And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority.

None of us is certain about the outcome of the Arab Spring.

A rebellion is not a revolution. It may ultimately lead to that end.

The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.

Certainly we've seen the enormous changes across the whole of the Middle East. The democratic genie is out of the bottle.

The Arab Spring I think we will look back whether it's two years, five years, ten or fifteen. And say it's a good thing.

When we overthrew Mubarak, we did this in 18 days. And because we were very naive and very unexperienced in revolutions, we thought that that was it. It is very difficult to imagine that you can actually get rid of a dictatorship that has been there for 60 years only in 18 days. So we were very naive.

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

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

It was a bad looking mob. It was animated by the essence of revolution.

Something is stirring in the hearts and minds of the people.

When citizens have no political way to deal with revolution, they become counter-revolutionary.

Americans have a tendency to exalt the concept of a popular uprising.

Usually the impetus of a revolution is a relatively small group with positive goals but also a larger collection of people with resentments.

The Arab world’s wave of change was a century in the making, Why expect its effects to become clear in the space of months

Had you asked an expert on the Middle East what changes would be likely to tke place in 2011, almost none would have predicted the Arab Spring and none would have chosen Tunisia as the flashpoint.