Quotes About Occupy Movement

“We believe that the movement, from Cairo to New York, from San Francisco to London, that is being called "Occupy" is a movement of spiritual democracy.”

— Adam Bucko

“The Occupy Wall Street movement faltered when activists realized that traders were quite busy already.”

— The Covert Comic

“Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity. For some of the mothers I know, a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seems to disrupt
a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.”

— Eula Biss

“Whether one agrees or disagrees with the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it's easy to understand the inspiration for its anger as well as its impatience.”

— Eric Alterman

“Occupy Wall Street is a real movement.”

— Russ Feingold

“The Occupy movement has drawn attention to how too many in the 1 percent get to play by their own rules while exploiting the 99 percent.”

— Robert Greenwald

“The new social question is: democracy or the rule of the financial markets. We are currently witnessing the end of an era. The neoliberal ideology has failed worldwide. The U.S. movement Occupy Wall Street is a good example of this.”

— Sigmar Gabriel

“Occupy Wall Street didn't just spring from the earth organically, out of thin air. This was all part of the global socialist movement.”

— Monica Crowley

“I have a lot of sympathy with the ideas and frustration of the Occupy movement. I absolutely agree with the sense that Wall Street has brought an economic calamity to the middle class and that no one has been held accountable.”

— Susan Bysiewicz

“'Peace Mom' is my most heartfelt, but I am most proud of 'Myth America' because I nailed the problem and gave the solutions long before the Occupy Movement. I think it's a great organic class analysis.”

— Cindy Sheehan

“The only good political movement I've seen lately was Occupy Wall Street. They had no leaders, which was genius. But unfortunately it always ends up with some hippy playing a flute.”

— John Lydon

“Occupy Wall Street was a disorganized movement without a clear focus and power base - essential in any successful revolution - but the message was clear: the divisions between those who are fortunate enough to enjoy city living as opposed to those who find it unbearable are too wide.”

— Janine Di Giovanni

“The thing about Occupy is that the sentiment the movement embodies is timeless: Don't be greedy, share.”

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

“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.”

— Nigel Farage

“I think the Occupy movement is absolutely fantastic; in my opinion, it's probably one of the most important people's movements of the 21st century and the 20th century. The trouble is that nobody really wants to support what they represent. They are too 'grassroots' for their own good.”

— David Lloyd

“Since the start of the Occupy Wall Street movement, CODEPINK activists have joined the frontlines of the non-violent Occupy movement across the country.”

— Jodie Evans

“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.”

— David Harvey

“If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.”

— David Harvey

“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.”

— Alan Moore

“I've been saying the Occupy Movement has got the ball rolling, and now we need to take the fight to the great indoors!”

— Ani DiFranco

“The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it - and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.”

— Arundhati Roy

“The new elites have no allegiances to nation states and don't care about the damage they do to workers, the environment, or the rest of humanity. They are unhinged sociopaths, far removed from what the Occupy Movement called the '99 percent.'”

— Henry Giroux

“The Occupy movement is - it was a big surprise.”

— Noam Chomsky

“The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.”

— Noam Chomsky

“The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.”

— Noam Chomsky

“The 'Occupy' movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning 'the corporation as a person,' and some legislators are supporting that concept.”

— John Battelle

“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.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

“Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.”

— Douglas Rushkoff

“The Occupy movement needs an organizing principle, and - just as the Tea Party did - it needs some actual measures of success. Choose one candidate whose agenda is squarely within that of the movement and make his or her electoral success a focal point.”

— Eliot Spitzer

“Occupy has to continue as a bold, in-your-face movement - occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, campuses and Wall Street itself. We need weekly - if not daily - nonviolent assaults right on Wall Street.”

— Michael Moore

“There should be a public outcry about what happened to me and other women in the name of our government! But history has shown "the customs of society and laws of the State allowed it to crush my aspirations and barred me from the the pursuit of almost every object worthy of an intelligent, rational mind."45 What law has the right to entrust the interest of myself and my children into the hands of such an evil bunch of men? I did not occupy my rightful place in 1976.
45. (paraphrased from Gurko, Miriram, The Ladies of Seneca Falls; the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement, 1974.”

— Diane Chamberlain

“I think this is a moment of a lot of possibilities, and openings. Occupy and the 99% movement are really going to break through, and we are going to create a new economy, an economy that we need that works for everyone. Where everyone works, everyone counts and everyone contributes.”

— Ai-jen Poo

“The important thing is to know why we want to dance. We dance a solitude that we have inside us and cannot occupy with anything. This gap, that emptiness to which we put movement is the TANGO.”

— Carlos Gavito

“And with the Occupy Movement, it's really ironic how the police come as representatives and enforcers of the powers that be, even though the people in the Occupy Movement are really on their side - not in terms of their behavior, but in terms of their economic status, in terms of who the police are in society and how much they're paid, and if you boil it down to the economics of it, the police should be out there marching with the Occupy Movement.”

— Oren Moverman

“Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick- Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on "Jersey Shore." The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters.”

— Chris Hedges

“I want to remind the viewers that people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement which is actually full of anarchists.”

— Katie Pavlich

“The 'Occupy' movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole.”

— Mark Steyn

“If Occupy Wall Street was actually a march, and people from all around the country could collect and march toward Washington, D.C., as part of this massive movement of people ... I think that kind of pressure is much more powerful than a sit-in that seems to be a little unorganized.”

— Scarlett Johansson

“Regulate the banks, get money out of elections; raise the minimum wage, environmental issues. They're all very important and the Occupy movement made a difference. It shifted not only the discourse but to some extent, action on these issues.”

— Noam Chomsky