Coups Quotes

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup. ~ Barbara Tuchman

Miracles are God's coups d'etat. ~ Sophie Swetchine

Nothing exceptional [would happen to the world under a Hillary Clinton's presidency] - things would stay the same: sponsorship of "Color" or "Umbrella" or whatever "revolutions", some more coups, "regime changes", direct invasions, bombing, propaganda warfare against China, Russia, Iran, South Africa and what is left of the Latin American revolutions. There would be plenty of torture in "secret centers", but it would not be as advertised and glorified as it would be if [Donald] Trump were elected. ~ Andre Vltchek

A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder. ~ Edward Luttwak

In two years, there were 22 military coups d'etat, essentially in Africa and the third world. The coup d'etat of Algiers, in 1965, is what opened the path. ~ Ahmed Ben Bella

One of their most famous coups was underwriting a $10 million loan for a growing mail-order house called Sears, Roebuck, headed by Goldman's distant relative. It was the first time a mail-order security had ever been on the market-a calculated risk, but one that paid off. ~ Kenneth L. Fisher

The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views. ~ Bob Woodward

It advances Democracy": As it was throughout the Cold War, the response here should be "Democracy for whom?" "Democracy" has never been a univocal concept; and as a word, it has surely by now been degraded by so many reactionary projects, such as U.S. imperialism itself and the various middle class comprador movements that have furthered its purposes through coups and color revolutions. It is not the nominal political form aspired to, but the social goods that are being sought, that should weigh our evaluations of those who use such rhetoric. ~ Anonymous

It's as if we have returned to the era of Protagoras and the sophists, the era when the art of persuasion
for which slogans, commercials, public propaganda meetings, newspapers, cinema, radio are the modern equivalent
took the place of thought, determined the fate of cities and accomplished coups ~ Simone Weil

A military coup needs a sacrifice and courage that you can't find in an army without morale. ~ Jalal Talabani

What happened in Russia in 1917 wasn't a revolution - it was a coup d'etat. ~ Margaret Thatcher

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds - blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming. ~ Arundhati Roy

All good coups begin with the deposing of the current leader. ~ Karen Marie Moning

There are no term limits on His reign. He has always been King and He always will be King. There is no death that threatens the perpetuity of His sovereign authority. There is no usurping of power by a lesser rival to His throne. There are no coups, no revolutions (at least, none that succeed). There is no threat of impeachment. He is a King who rules eternally. ~ Sam Storms

Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn't need watching, and so we don't. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours. ~ Bill Bryson

That has always been a strength of Haiti: Beyond crisis, it has beautiful art; it has beautiful music. But people have not heard about those as much as they heard about the coups and so forth. I always hope that the people who read me will want to learn more about Haiti. ~ Edwidge Danticat

So is he a radical?" non-Muslims often asked when I told them about the Sheikh. "Not at all," I'd say, assuming we were all speaking in post-9/11 code. "Of course not."

And I'd meant it. He is not a radical. Or rather, not their kind of radical.

His radicalism is of entirely another caliber. He's an extremist quietist, calling on Muslims to turn away from politics and to leave behind the frameworks of thought popularised by Islamists in recent centuries. Akram's call for an apolitical Islam unpicked the conditioning of a generation of Muslims, raised on the works of Abu l'Ala Maududi and Sayyid Qutb and their nineteenth-century forerunners. These ideologues aimed to make Islam relevant to the sociopolitical struggles facings Muslims coping with modernity. Their works helped inspire revolutions, coups, and constitutions. But while these thinkers equated faith with political action, the Sheikh believed that politics was puny. He was powered by a certainty that we are just passing through this earth and that mundane quests for land or power miss Islam's point. Compared with the men fighting for worldly turf, Akram was far more uncompromising: turn away from quests for nation-states or parliamentary seats and toward God. "Allah doesn't want people to complain to other people," he said. "People must complain to Allah, not to anyone else."

All the time spent fulminating, organising, protesting? It could be saved for prayer. So unjust governments run ~ Carla Power

When Husni Zaim seized power from Shukri al-Quwatli on 30 March 1949, Syria's economy was a parlous state and its army had been beaten the previous November by the Israelis. Zaim knew that he needed to take action on both fronts fast. After overthrowing al-Quwatli bloodlessly, he set out to open peace talks with the Israelis and mend relations with the French via a currency agreement and an arms deal that would pave the way for renewed French influence in the former mandate. But Zaim's reign did not last long. One hundred and thirty-seven days after he had taken power, on 14 August he too was overthrown and executed. ~ James Barr

Two large trials of antioxidants were set up after Peto's paper (which rather gives the lie to nutritionists' claims that vitamins are never studied because they cannot be patented: in fact there have been a great many such trials, although the food supplement industry, estimated by one report to be worth over $50 billion globally, rarely deigns to fund them). One was in Finland, where 30,000 participants at high risk of lung cancer were recruited, and randomised to receive either ß-carotene, vitamin E, or both, or neither. Not only were there more lung cancers among the people receiving the supposedly protective ß-carotene supplements, compared with placebo, but this vitamin group also had more deaths overall, from both lung cancer and heart disease. The results of the other trial were almost worse. It was called the 'Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial', or 'CARET', in honour of the high p-carotene content of carrots. It's interesting to note, while we're here, that carrots were the source of one of the great disinformation coups of World War II, when the Germans couldn't understand how our pilots could see their planes coming from huge distances, even in the dark. To stop them trying to work out if we'd invented anything clever like radar (which we had), the British instead started an elaborate and entirely made-up nutritionist rumour. Carotenes in carrots, they explained, are transported to the eye and converted to retinal, which is the molecule that detects light in the ~ Ben Goldacre

Thirty-two coups d'etat are enough. ~ Jean-Bertrand Aristide

The opponents of perestroika had suffered a defeat, and then they organized the coup. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

The free enterprise concept inherent in the economic model of capitalism should mean common people, or lower and middle class wage-earners, have greater potential to rise up and gain financial independence. In reality, however, free enterprise all too often leads to an almost total lack of government regulation that in turn allows the global elite to run amuck in Gordon Gecko-style financial coups. ~ James Morcan

There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness. ~ Edwidge Danticat

All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea ... ~ George Lucas

We saw groups of people gathering in front of Lula's house in Sao Paulo this morning. You had people shouting at one another, and some fistfights even broke out. Some of his supporters are claiming that this is equivalent of a coup attempt, an attempt to remove Rousseff from power and prevent Lula from running again. And other people are saying that this is simply a display of rule of law in Brazil, that no one in Brazil can be above the law at this time. ~ Simon Romero

Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn't hard to understand. It wasn't something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d'etat - they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. ~ Arundhati Roy

It's really funny if two women stand on the House floor. There are usually at least two men who go by and say, 'What is this, a coup?' They're almost afraid to see us in public together. ~ Patricia Schroeder

Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way. ~ John Ralston Saul

Before the military coup in Chile, we had the idea that military coups happen in Banana Republics, somewhere in Central America. It would never happen in Chile. Chile was such a solid democracy. And when it happened, it had brutal characteristics. ~ Isabel Allende

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought
in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and
body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened,
though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest,
low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The turning point for me was when the Supreme Court installed Bush in 2000, even though he got half a million votes less nationally than Gore. It was nothing more than a bloodless coup and that's when I really started paying attention. ~ Mark Edwards