Squatters Quotes

If you forgive people enough, you belong to them, and they to you, whether either person likes it or not - squatter's rights of the heart ~ James Hilton

Take away the Holocaust and what do you have left? Without their precious Holocaust, what are the Jews? Just a grubby little bunch of international bandits and assassins and squatters who have perpetrated the most massive, cynical fraud in human history. ~ Harold Covington

There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that. ~ Stewart Brand

We will only keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miseries, shantytowns and squatter villages when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today - and will make possible tomorrow. ~ Alvin Toffler

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots - written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements - and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or - it sounded just as bad in English - 'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they took the land because god had given it to them from time immemorial. In the noisome town of Hebron, where all of life is focused on a supposedly sacred boneyard in a dank local cave, one of the world's less pretty sights is that of supposed yeshivah students toting submachine guns and humbling the Arab inhabitants. When I asked one of these charmers where he got his legal authority to be a squatter, he flung his hand, index finger outstretched, toward the sky. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Next to it on the wall was a framed postcard of Monet's berm. I recognized it immediately.

'It used to be mine, but you've owned it far, far longer than I have.' We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now. Squatters, and only squatters, were the true claimants to our lives. ~ Andre Aciman

In October 1805, Stoddard's tour left St. Louis, including forty-five Indians from eleven tribes. They arrived in Washington in January 1806. Jefferson gave them the standard Great Father talk: "We are become as numerous as the leaves of the trees, and, tho' we do not boast, we do not fear any nation. . . . My children, we are strong, we are numerous as the stars in the heavens, & we are all gun-men." He followed the threat with the carrot: if they would be at peace with one another and trade with the Americans, they could be happy. (In reply, one of the chiefs said he was glad the Americans were as numerous as the stars in the skies, and powerful as well. So much the better, in fact, for that meant the government should be strong enough to keep white squatters off Indian lands.) ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property. ~ Thomas A. Edison

Weeds don't need planting in well-drained soil; they don't ask for fertilizer or bits of rag to scare away the birds. They come without invitation; and they don't take the hint when you want them to go. Weeds are nobody's guests: More like squatters. ~ Norman Nicholson

The guys were totally skuzzy, grinning horribly, showing holes where teeth should be.
"Boys, God doesn't like you," Fang intoned behind them.
Whaaat? I thought, dumbfounded.
"Wha!" they said, whirling.
At that moment, Fang snapped out his huge wings and shone the penlight under his chin so it raked his cheekbones and eyes. My mouth dropped open. He looked like the angel of death.
His dark wings filled the hallway almost to the ceiling, and he moved them up and down. "God doesn't like bad people," he said, using a really weird, deep voice.
"What the heck?" one of the squatters murmured shallowly, his mouth slack, his eyes bugging out of his head.
I whipped my own wings open. Fun, anyway.
"This was a test," I said, using my best spooky voice. "And guess what? You both failed."
The bums stopped dead, looks of horror and amazement on their faces.
Then Fang growled, "Rowr!" He stepped forward, sweeping his wings up and down: the avenging demon. I almost cracked up.
"Rowr!" I said myself, shaking my wings out.
"Ahhhhh!" the guys yelled, backpedaling fast. Unfortunately, they were standing at the top of the staircase. They fell awkwardly, trying to grab each other, and rolled down two flights like lumpy bags of potatoes, shrieking the whole way.
Fang and I slapped each other a quick high five - and we were out of there, jack. ~ James Patterson

Eli knew stuff about buildings and architecture and the history of squatters' rights. In fact, he seemed to know something about everything. He didn't lecture or flaunt. Rather, it was as though his whole life he'd been quietly gathering treasures. Little nuggets and gems of things he had heard or seen or read, and he was just uncurling his fingers to share them. ~ Jessica Fechtor

Phil Cousineau has created a fine companion book to accompany the important film he and Gary Rhine have made in defense of the religious traditions of Native Americans. [Native Americans] are recognized the world over as keepers of a vital piece of the Creator's original orders, and yet they are regarded as little more than squatters at home. This book features impressive interviews, beautiful illustrations, and gives a voice to the voiceless. ~ Peter Coyote

Your body isn't really yours, Jackie boy. Your body is mine and I'm claiming squatter's rights. ~ Jonathan Dunne

Neighborhood folk still came, in small vanquished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed, overdrunken group of squatters with minds so highly developed that they were excused from good manners, tastes so refined in one direction that they were excused for having none in any other, emotions so cultivated that the only aberration was normality, all afloat here on sodden pools of depravity calculated only to manifest the pricelessness of what they were throwing away, the three sexes in two colors, a group of people all mentally and physically the wrong size. ~ William Gaddis

As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people
from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s
have always turned to the park land for shelter ... The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power. ~ Rebecca Solnit

In bed, I steal moments of tenderness when sex has finally exhausted me to the point where I'm too bone weary to fret anymore about the enormous capacity for evil that's taken up squatter's rights inside me. I touch him, put all those things I don't say into my hands as I trace the red and black tattoos on his skin, the sharp planes and hollows of his face, bury my hands in his dark hair. He watches me in silence when I do, eyes dark, unfathomable.
I sometimes wake up to find he's pulled me close to him and is holding me, spooned into my back with his face in my hair, and those hands that don't speak like mine don't speak move over my skin and tell me I'm cherished, honored, seen. ~ Karen Marie Moning

The church belongs to its hierarchy, which is men in power. Those outside the hierarchy, and especially women, are at best only renters and at worst squatters in religious territory. ~ Sonia Johnson

Don't do it quickly, but don't wait too long ... If we wait too long to forgive, our rage settles in and claims squatter's rights to our souls. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

I think people need housing. And there's empty buildings, I think people should live in there. If you want to call them squatters, trespassers, hey, I call Wall Street thieves! ~ Al Lewis

New Terrans, she supposed. Unless the squatters' naming schema won out. Then ... what? Ilusians? Illusions? It was a stupid fucking name. ~ James S.A. Corey

Traditional feminism would tell you that we should concentrate on the big stuff like pay inequality, female circumcision in the Third World, and domestic abuse. And they are, obviously, pressing and disgusting and wrong, and the world cannot look itself squarely in the eye until they're stopped. But all those littler, stupider, more obvious day-to-day problems with being a woman are, in many ways, just as deleterious to women's peace of mind. It is the "Broken Windows" philosophy, transferred to female inequality. In the Broken Windows theory, if a single broken window on an empty building is ignored and not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may break into the building and light fires, or become squatters. Similarly, if we live in a climate where female pubic hair is considered distasteful, or famous and powerful women are constantly pilloried for being too fat or too thin, or badly dressed, then, eventually, people start breaking into women, and lighting fires in them. Women will get squatters. Clearly, this is not a welcome state of affairs. ~ Caitlin Moran