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“The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.”

True happiness comes only by making others happy.

Relying on a half-century-old study is less than ideal, but necessary: Few sociologists study looting specifically. But interviews with a half-dozen experts on protests and social movements provide some insights into looters’ motivations. For one thing, looters and peaceful protesters aren’t typically the same people. Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, has studied protests for 20 years, and she says it’s rare for peaceful protesters to start stealing and setting fires at random. People flock to the sites of protests with different motivations, and those who want peace tend to stay peaceful. “I’ve never seen somebody come in who’s peaceful and then it’s like, Hey, they just broke that window over there. I’m going to now start looting,” she told me. Those in the looting group also have varied motivations. In their 1968 study, Dynes and Quarantelli note that vandalism during protests focuses on objects and buildings that are “symbolic of other values.” For example, people are more likely to attack symbols of authority—such as the CNN building or police cars—than apartment buildings. In this way, some of the looting is a lashing-out against capitalism, the police, and other forces that are seen as perpetuating racism. “Widespread looting, then, may perhaps be interpreted as a kind of mass protest against our dominant conceptions of property,” Dynes and Quarantelli wrote. It is a “bid for the redistribution of property.”

“It is often difficult for us to do things because they are so very different from what we are used to, not because the thing itself is particularly difficult.”

I used to....

“You’re complicated. You need someone who gets that about you.”