Song Baorui Quotes

Poverty is the parent of revolution.

There will never be quietness in this country till half a dozen of you be hanged or banished.

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

‎What is to prevent, say, an uprising?

I'm 68 years old, and I'm as much a criminal now as I was at the age of 22. And, I'm even more of a dissident than I was then.

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.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

The seed of revolution is repression.

Unless something drastic is done very soon, then bloodshed and violence are going to happen…almost inevitably… A people made desperate by despair and injustice and oppression will use desperate means.

If officials are too forceful, people will revolt.

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

As soon as control eases, there is chaos. [Yi fang, jiu luan.]

Nothing endurable can be produced on a soil soaked with blood and moved by violent agitations.

Scarcely a year now passes without an insurrection in some of their [China’s] provinces. It is true they are soon suppressed, but their frequency is a strong symptom of the fever within.

There is no way a spirit of resistance that has sunk so deep in the population can be repressed.

I remember being in Washington for high school when the city was on fire and those were troubling times, the Vietnam War, the protests.

I've never really subscribed to the theory that repression breeds rebellion. I don't think that's really true.

Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.

Listen, 'The Purge' actually exists in some form or another in many places around the world when you think about it.

I was called a terrorist yesterday, but when I came out of jail, many people embraced me, including my enemies, and that is what I normally tell other people who say those who are struggling for liberation in their country are terrorists.

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.

So, these political activities will create friction in and of themselves, and in this environment of friction there'll be additional violence.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

Fight the power that be. Fight the power.