Rioting Quotes

There is no American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from the rooftops. That is crime—and crime must be dealt with forcefully and swiftly, and certainly—under law.

I will not allow continued planned street violence between rival factions to take place on the streets of Portland.

For the people of Baltimore, I don't criticize rioting, because I understand it. But after the fires die down, organize, strategize, and mobilize.

Puppet Papademos is in place, and as Athens caught fire on Sunday night he rather took my breath away - he said violence and destruction have no place in a democratic country.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

When you loot or behave violently, you give grounds to those that try to justify illegal police abuse. You become the poster child for them to say, 'See, we have no choice but to shoot and kill, or use a chokehold, because just look at the way they behave.'

Shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city.

There are many avenues to peacefully protest, but those rights don't extend to illegal actions, breaching security perimeters, and threatening police officers.

It is the resolve of the government that none will be allowed to get away with making speeches that can cause sedition or that can cause violence, especially because when we make these kinds of pronouncement and do things that can cause violence or destruction of lives and property, we are no longer in control.

Violence is not a constitutionally protected right. Damaging property is not a constitutionally protected right; inciting violence is not a constitutionally protected right.

There is nothing more foolish, nothing more given to outrage than a useless mob.

Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.

We are creating a generation that is losing hope, and when people don't have hope then they have nothing to lose. And when people have nothing to lose it's a short step to rob or loot or riot or burn or even kill.

Rioting definitely brings attention to the situation at hand.

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and mask on his face. They are lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.

I felt that if we, as the Met, were not intervening once one person starts digging up Parliament Square, then someone else is going to join in and you have a spiral.

An armed body of white men at Rock Springs, Wyoming, have attacked Chinese coal miners working for Union Pacific Railway ... Have driven Chinamen out of town into hills. Have burned their houses and are destroying railroad property; some 40 houses burned; 3 men known to be killed, many more believed to be. Mob now preventing some 500 Chinamen from reaching food or shelter.

Once people start throwing wet stuff, I go inside.

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

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.

Let me completely condemn these sickening scenes; scenes of looting, scenes of vandalism, scenes of thieving, scenes of people attacking police, of people even attacking firefighters. This is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted.

Some people watching CNN were so shocked they started rioting. No, I'm kidding. No one watches CNN.

Let us not be carried away by the undisguised agitations of leaders who virtually asked people to take the law into their own hands.