Quotable

FAVORITE QUOTES

“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

“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

“[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

“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

“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]

“… 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]

“Foucault schmucault!” —Stephen C. Fleury [NCSS, Anaheim, 1998]

“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]

“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

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *