Quotations

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” — Christopher Hitchens

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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 [The Revolution of Everyday Life]

“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

“Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.”—Jean-Paul Sartre

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” —Henry David Thoreau

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.”—Sinclair Lewis

“[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 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

“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”]

“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

“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

“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

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” —Anais Nin

“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

“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

“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

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