Politics & Power Quote by Colin Powell

"It isn't enough just to scream at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. We need our political system to start reflect this anger back into, 'How do we fix it? How do we get the economy going again?'"

Colin Powell, Statesman

About this Quote

Powell’s line performs the classic establishment two-step: validate the grievance, then discipline the method. By conceding that anger is real and even justified, he borrows the moral energy of Occupy without granting it veto power. The key phrase is “reflect this anger back into” policy - a tidy bit of rhetoric that treats protest as raw emotion the system can responsibly process, like a feedback loop. It reassures anxious moderates: the streets can speak, but the institutions will decide.

The subtext is a warning about political legitimacy. “It isn’t enough just to scream” draws a bright line between expressive dissent and actionable governance, framing the former as incomplete, even slightly childish. Powell isn’t attacking Occupy so much as relocating it: from a challenge to the system to an input for it. That’s a move with consequences. It implies the system is fundamentally capable of self-correction, and that the main failure is translation - not structure, power, or capture.

Context matters: Occupy Wall Street erupted in 2011 amid post-crash fury over inequality, bailouts, and a recovery that felt like a private rescue mission. Powell, a national-security-reassurance brand of statesmanship, channels that moment into two safe imperatives: “fix it” and “get the economy going again.” Notice what’s missing: redistribution, regulation, or accountability. The quote works because it’s empathetic without being destabilizing - a pressure-release valve that turns protest into reformist homework.

Quote Details

Topic	Equality
Source	Help us find the source
Cite

More Quotes by Colin Add to List

About the Author

Colin Powell

Colin Powell (born April 5, 1937) is a Statesman from USA.

48 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"What you're seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they're directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society"

Colin Powell, Statesman

Colin Powell

"Yet what you need is not marches, demonstrations, rallies or wide associations, all of them are important. What you need is direct action. The sooner people understand that, the sooner we'll begin to change things"

Arthur Scargill, Politician

"We have to get government out of the job of picking winners and losers. That's what they've been doing the last year and a half, getting in the way of businesses that are trying to reinvest to get our economy back on its feet"

Kristi Noem, Politician

"We don't want to go back to the same policies and the same practices that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led us to this catastrophe. We have to keep moving forward"

David Axelrod, Public Servant

"The economy is too weak right now. We need to jump-start it. The American Jobs Act will provide that jump-start, to help us into next year and the year after that"

David Plouffe, Public Servant

"I suggest to you that increasing the size of America's economic pie - which can be achieved only if everybody has a seat at the table - is the most important challenge facing our country today"

William Weld, Politician

"The American people know the economy is too weak. Too many of them are suffering. So the question for Washington is, are we going to continue to play political games and - and - or are we going to say, we can do something right now to create jobs, to put money in the pockets of the middle-class, hire construction workers, teachers, veterans?"

David Plouffe, Public Servant

"The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest, their holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it, it's the truth. It is the truth"

Steve Wynn, Businessman

"My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious"

Fidel Castro, Statesman

"The fact is that the economy is really posed for the kind of recovery that people can see and understand"

Al D'Amato, Politician

"If we don't make earnest moves toward real solutions, then each day we move one day closer to revolution and anarchy in this country. This is the sad, and yet potentially joyous, state of America"

Louis Farrakhan, Activist

"We have a country that is $5 a gallon gas, $4 a gallon gas, we got unbearable unemployment and a federal government that is out of control. We have to take back this country and we've got to get off the sidelines and take it to President Obama"

Tim Pawlenty, Politician

"We must develop huge demonstrations, because the world is used to big dramatic affairs. They think in terms of hundreds of thousands and millions and billions... Billions of dollars are appropriated at the twinkling of an eye. Nothing little counts"

A. Philip Randolph, Activist

A. Philip Randolph

"If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans"

Marian Wright Edelman, Activist

Marian Wright Edelman

"If our republican form of government is perishing because communications - the infrastructure of that republic - is under the yoke of international business how, at last, do we save it? We must build a confrontational movement to reclaim our democracy, a movement committed to active and sustained protest against the present order"

Mark Lloyd, Public Servant

"We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present: unemployment, inflation... but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America"

Barbara Jordan, Politician

Barbara Jordan

"There's no recovery on Main Street, I can tell you that for sure. And in a re - in an economy like this, we don't need to be raising anybody's taxes"

Haley Barbour, Politician

"We have to realize we are building a movement"

Dorothy Height, Activist

"But what we're determined to do, and what the reforms will do is to make sure this system goes back to its core purpose of taking the savings of Americans and from investors around the world and allocating those to people with an idea, not just the largest companies in the country, but to small businesses with an idea and a plan for growing"

Timothy Geithner, Public Servant

"Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up"

Jose Saramago, Writer