FAVORITE QUOTES
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” ― Tales of Ordinary Madness, Charles Bukowski
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” — Christopher Hitchens
“… the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom.” — Guy Debord et al [“Position of the Lettrist International,” 1952]
“I want to die a slave to principles. Not to men.” — Emiliano Zapata
“The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.” —Paul K. Feyerabend
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” —Anais Nin
“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.” —Karl Marx
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
“Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.”—Jean-Paul Sartre
“The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another—no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.” —Marx & Engels
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historical, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.” — Richard Feynman
“When it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government. Independence is my happiness, the world is my country and my religion is to do good.” – Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man
“In short, in a society that is absurd, unworkable, wasteful, destructive, secretive, coercive, monopolistic, and generally antihuman, we could never have good education, no matter what kind of schools the powers that be permit, because it is not the educators or the schools but the whole society and the quality of life in it that really educate …. More and more it seems to me, and this is a reversal of what I felt not long ago, that it makes very little sense to talk about education for social change, as if education was or could be a kind of getting ready. The best and perhaps only education for social change is action to bring about that change …. There cannot be little worlds fit for children in a world not fit for anyone else.” — John Holt
“A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept rest …. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.” — Michel Foucault
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” —Henry David Thoreau
“We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom…….You want to fuck around with us? Not for long.”— Raoul Vaneigem
“Progress in human affairs has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests.” —E. H. Carr, What is History?
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”—Mayer Amshel Rothschild
“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.”—Sinclair Lewis
“Without awareness there is moral and mental death.”—Jerome Bruner
“Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant—and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing—that in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson [“Quotation and Originality”]
“Today, the voice you speak with may not be your own.” Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. [Rhythm Science]
“Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.” —Guy Debord [“For a Revolutionary Judgement of Art”]
“Think! It ain’t illegal yet!” —George Clinton [“Lunchmeatophobia”]
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” —William Gibson
“Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus.… Dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—“I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.” ― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
“The dream is to find the open channel. What then is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence?Admitting that we do not know and maintaining the attitude that we do not know the direction necessarily to go, permit the possibility of alteration, of thinking, of new contributions and new discoveries for the problem of developing a way to do what we want ultimately, even when we do not know what we want.” —Richard P. Feynman, physicist
“Any shift in the traffic of information can create not only new thoughts, but new ways of thinking.” —Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. [Rhythm Science]
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” —John Stuart Mill
“People do not always argue because they misunderstand one another, they argue because they hold different goals.” —William H. Whyte
“One form of wage labor may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labor can correct the abuse of wage labor itself.” —Karl Marx
“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. — Guy Debord [Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 1, 1967]
“A fundamental need of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions. Then of course it will follow that a decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized. Now, a federated, decentralized system of free associations incorporating economic as well as social institutions would be what I refer to as an anarcho-syndicalism and it seems to me that it is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in a machine.” —Noam Chomsky
“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.” —Raoul Vaneigem
“[In The Power Elite (1956) C. Wright Mills quoted] Sophie Tucker (without either approval or disapproval in the context) ‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and believe me, rich is best.’ For a radical, the corollary of the this attitude is that it is not wealth that is wrong with America but poverty, and that what is reprehensible about the rich is not that they enjoy the good things of life but that they use their power to maintain a system which needlessly denies the same advantages to others. —Paul M. Sweezy, “Power Elite and the Ruling Class,” Monthly Review, September, 1956
“Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy and let it be a war of extermination without pity.” —Lucy Parsons quoted in Women Building Chicago, 2001, p. 671
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