Michael Shannon Quotes

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.

An economic failure becomes a radicalizing force only when an alternative exists

All of this is happening because there has still been no reckoning post the financial crisis. So governments have fallen, one bloke has been to prison, the banks have gone pretty well back to status quo, the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. And it's fuelling anger. And somehow [Donald] Trump, who represents the worst aspects of capitalism, has persuaded people he can deal with that.

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

We have enough votes to run the country. And when the people say, We've had enough, we are going to take over.

I think what the secretary Hillary Clinton has recognized is the American people are extremely angry about the power of Wall Street, the greed, the illegal behavior of Wall Street.

People involved in a revolution don't become part of the system; they destroy the system... The Negro revolution is no revolution because it condemns the system and then asks the system it has condemned to accept them.

There's a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn't have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the 'demands' of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world.

I have been unsure, from the start, what the Occupy movement was all about, although I did suspect that it was just fatuous, anti-enterprise, left-wingery.

Deregulation created this epidemic of greed which according to the rules of capitalism was OK. Beyond that there was criminal behaviour. There have been no repercussions and it's hard to make your peace with.

I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who's too big to fail.

I'm not anti-Wall Street - I'm anti-distortions to free markets.

I have watched Occupy Wall Street mostly from the sidelines.

As far as I can tell, 1968 is a year about change, about revolution, about violence, about people turning inwards as community breaks down.

Debt and revolution are inseparable as cause and effect.

We need reform, but not at the hands of Wall Street.

The government protects corporations, not people and other animals.

The people who are denied participation in the American Dream -- will wreck it.

The similarities are limited but real. They amount to a shared disgust with politics as usual in America. The Tea Party focuses on the federal government; Occupy Wall Street focuses on corporate America and its influence over the government.

Let us not be so naive as to think that revolution is just a matter of social or economic discontent.

The very welfare state the Occupy Wall Street protesters so eagerly applaud is what has saddled Greece with colossal debt and left its economy on the brink of collapse, igniting violent protests across the nation.

People never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which they live.

I've realised that as long as the youth has the ability to use social media and their voice is there, people can actually cut through the nonsense and see what's really going on. People are live streaming from the ground, so everyone's starting to become more aware. When you pull back from this playground of duality, where someone is right and someone is wrong, you recognise that this is the way things have played out for years and years. And as long as the youth culture can see the madness that's going on in the world, there will eventually be a revolution.