Scott McClellan Quotes

There is no more democratic government than a revolutionary government.

A great democratic revolution is taking place in our midst.

When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.

The 'Arab Spring' is the most spectacular example of the dispersal of power.

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

It's always the small people who change things. It's never the politicians or the big guys. I mean, who pulled down the Berlin wall? It was all the people in the streets. The specialists didn't have a clue the day before.

Progressive change in this country has never come from above.

There is no sound more powerful than the marching feet of a determined people.

I don't accept armed struggle. Maybe it was the way in the '50s and '60s, but we want a democratic revolution.

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine is a good example of how people, who are robbed of their right to vote, can protest and put an end to dictatorship.

...dissent, protest, presures of a wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards "justice, freedom and democracy" within its domains.

If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come through citizen's movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.

The point is change can come about, but it only comes about when millions of people are actively involved in political struggle, the billionaires may have the money, but we have the people.

The Arab spring reminds me a bit of the decolonisation process where one country gets independence and everybody else wants it. How about us, when do we get it, when do we make our move? And you have a situation where someone has been in power for decades, where the integrity of elections, democracy and security have really not been debated or discussed and most people suspect that elections are rigged and that the democratic rotation that elections are supposed to ensure doesn't really happen. And when this goes on for a while you are sitting on a powder keg.

We must remember, elections are short-term efforts. Revolutions are long-term projects.

If the people of America do not rise up, take ownership of our country, we're going to lose it forever.

They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.

The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.

The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.

Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood.

The Arab spring confirmed that peaceful change is possible and so reinforced the vision of political Islam. The impact of this went beyond the Brotherhood to include the Salafist tendency in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya that had questioned the democratic path.

King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

Support for peaceful reform by the people themselves is the right way to promote democracy, not the use of force.

All power lays in the people!

Some in the West have long argued that because of the lack of a viable liberal alternative, supporting authoritarian regimes in Arab countries is the only political choice against the Islamists. Now, in Tunisia, as people flood into the streets demanding democracy, we see that this is not the case. It was not the case in Iran in 1979 either, but the West was so invested in the Shah that it failed to strongly back the liberal opposition. We don't have to repeat that error today.