Barack Obama Quotes

Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.

We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough.

the Ukrainian Government will fight with all its power against violations of public order, will strike the brigands and pogrom instigators with the severest punishment …. [they are] evil-doers who are the scum of humanity.

It's amazing how easily people are led to fury and chaos. Unhappy people with guns are not going to make this country great.

There is only so much chaos a nation can stand.

You can't even look outside because everything's so crazy, especially in America. And I live in Detroit! There's the economy, and the fact you can't even open your door any more without going nuts.

America cannot function if we are a society fueled by riots.

Law and order are more fragile than we might think.

The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

I just watched the news. Seeing crazy people doing crazy stuff to other people and pretending that they're the good guys really helped.

A mob cannot be a permanency: everybody's interest requires that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all.

Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana, they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding States. Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever then their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.

I would certainly say that. I don't want to see riots. I don't want to see problems.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides. It has no place in America. What is vital now is a swift restoration of law and order and the protection of innocent lives.

There were millions of such families anxious only for peace and quiet in their own little nests. These were the mounting blocks by which the criminals climbed to power and kept it.

In June 1968, five days before my mother's forty -sixth birthday, the world fell apart again. Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy, who died the next day. Why were people shooting all the Kennedys? Had the country gone mad?

One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.

My God, is it possible that all the people have gone mad? The civil war now being inaugurated will be as horrible as his Satanic Majesty could desire.

Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other's heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.

Forcing people into a situation where they're supposed to adore each other is probably bad. But letting people get on and off the 6 train without stabbing each other, that's good.

Nothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that's going on now in America, that it's always been chaos - people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It's the scale that's amazing, and also the proximity to our own time.

There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again

Still people are dangerous.

The difference between a stable society and an unstable one is that the restraints in an unstable one are external. In a stable society government ultimately becomes unnecessary; the restraints on people's actions are internal, they're self-disciplined.