Student Protests Quotes

I always knew the Sixties wasn't a revolution. It really was just a bunch of university students with wealthy parents having fun.

We are living, once again, at a time of extraordinary political engagements. Politics is a mass obsession. Progressive movements are growing and resisting with tremendous courage. And yet, we know from history that "no" is not enough. Now, there are some "yeses" out there that are emerging. And they're actually getting a lot bolder quickly. Where climate activists used to talk about changing light bulbs, now we're pushing for 100 percent of our energy to come from the sun, wind and waves, and to do it fast. Movements catalyzed by police violence against black bodies are calling for an end to militarized police, mass incarceration and even for reparations for slavery. Students are not just opposing tuition increases, but from Chile to Canada to the UK, they are calling for free tuition and debt cancellation. And yet, this still doesn't add up to the kind of holistic and universalist vision of a different world than our predecessors had. So why is that?

The student protests of the 1960s were partly the outcome of the hypertrophy of the university and the resulting shortcoming in higher education.

In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.

In 2011, when I established the activist group Scholarism, I could have not imagined that a year later, 100,000 people would take to the street and occupy for a week to urge the government to withdraw the national education curriculum.

When Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist and his black colleague Marvin Stewart were invited by the College Republicans to speak at Columbia last year, the tolerant, free-speech-loving Columbia students violently attacked them, shutting down the speech.

The most dangerous thing about student riots is that adults take them seriously.

I noticed that almost everyone I went to college with has worked at something other than the subject they majored in. I guess that' s one of the reasons for campus unrest.

Scripts were rather scarce in 1968. We did a lot of Amiri Baraka's plays, the agitprop stuff he was writing. It was at a time when black student organizations were active on the campuses, so we were invited to the colleges around Pittsburgh and Ohio, and even as far away as Jackson, Mississippi.

There was a period of time when I was very political, when I was at the university. It was like the late '60s, early '70s and I was a dissident like everybody else I guess. Now I follow it but there's nothing that really grabs me. The most fascinating thing to me right now is China.

One has the impression that the young do not want to, or perhaps cannot, grow up. Our campuses have become dour, playless nurseries echoing with doctrinaire baby talk. You see six-foot babies clamoring for power and protesting against universities not having adequate arrangements for child care.

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, Four dead in Ohio.

Students in the '60s were responsible for great changes, politically and socially.

Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests.

I lived in France during the '60s. I was there from the early '60s until 1970, so my view of the '60s is more global. It was a time of tremendous transition, not only for America but for the whole world.

Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'

Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents.

At college my three main interests were - in descending order of importance - a steady supply of recreational drugs, a 2-S draft deferment, and overthrowing the Nixon administration.

Those few days after Kent State were among the darkest of my presidency.

Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner - the know-nothing fundamentalist right - it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well.

I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that's always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.

I was a member of the Black Student Union, part of the central committee at San Francisco State. During the 1968 strike there, I was certainly very much involved in the activities that occurred on campus. It was part of an extraordinary period in my life

I think I know what is bothering the students. I think that what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future.

Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word 'fascist' all the time. College presidents were fascists; Vietnam War supporters were fascists. Policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists - on and on.

Everybody has the right to speak up in a democracy. We would be in trouble as a society if there wasn't a constant pressure to make reforms and to be just. Sometimes as prime minister, when i was caught up in a really loud demonstration, I used to say to myself that I deserved it because of all the demonstrations I myself had organized as a student against Duplessis.