society is like a stew, if you don't keep it stired all the scum settles on the top 2. let your actions define the finer points of your philosophy 3. anarchy doesnt mean no rules, it means no rulers

Contrary to popular belief, conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires.... But what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes, that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit

There’s not much that’s important to me at my age except making the world a better place. What would I do? I say we damn well better get out on the streets again. Everyone has to put their hand to the wheel and get out and get off their butt like in the sixties. We had compassion then, and we’ve lost it. It breaks my heart. I’ve lived through two depressions, two of them. Everyone at that time was just sick about the way things were, just like now, only it’s worse now. I see everything falling apart- people starving on the streets, children beaten in their homes, sick people without health care. Imagine this, in a country that spends so much on the war machine. I’d spend the money on health instead. I’d see that children are born healthy and make sure they stayed that way. All children, no matter what age. I’d clean the air, the water. I’d take away all that polluting shit they put on vegetables. I’d promote the use of sun, sea, and wind for natural energy. I’d save the forests, especially the redwoods. I’d ban firearms. I’d take away every nuclear device man to man. No wars, ever. NOW we’re talking health. How are we going to pay for all this? No one ever says we don’t have enough money to go to war. No one ever says we don’t have money for national defense. This is national defense.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintian their neutrality.

"Being an activist means being aware of what's ahppening around you as well as being in touch with your feelings about it -- your rage, your sadness, your excitement, your curiosity, your feeling of helplessnes, and your refusal to surrender. Being an activist means owning your desire."

Never have the armies of the North brought peace, prosperity, or democracy to the peoples of Asia, Africa, or Latin America. In the future, as in the past five centuries, they can only bring to these peoples further servitude, the exploitation of their labor, the expropriation of their riches, and the denial of their rights. It is of the utmost importance that the progressive forces of the West understand this.

"Charity is no substitute for justice withheld."

"so long as the water is troubled it cannot become stagnant."

"a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."

"you have to have a Northern Star to guide you, it doesn't mean you will reach it."

Groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having.

The text is (should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father.

"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for Independence."

You said that you wanted to put us on a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I was born where there were no enclosures and everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls.

A single decision by the chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell has a greater impact on the health of the planet than all the coffee-ground-composting, organic-cotton-wearing ecofreaks gathering in Washington D.C., for Earth Day festivities this weekend.

"How can you sit so comfortably with the indifference that you're evidencing with this tragedy (famine in Africa), when you could, in fact, take some part of that tragedy and fix it and make a difference? Not all of it. Don't sit there and be overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. Just pick out that portion which is yours, and kick butt. Go out there and make a difference. Change it. Change it. CHANGE IT."

Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more

With your whole body, with your whole heart, with your whole conscience, listen to the Revolution….This is the music everyone who has ears should hear.

First ponder, then dare.

Don't trust the wise fool too much; what he knows matters and you die without it. But he can never know enough.

You can be active, when the activists are sleeping with the sleepers, while you're waiting for the great leap forward.

I'm not a political songwriter. I'm just an honest songwriter.

Sink down in the slime Embrace the butcher But change the world It needs it.

He who knows not is a fool, but he who knows and says not a criminal.

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved -- (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case) -- had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of their children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves

Democracy is when you are not closed for being open.

He whom many fear, has himself many to fear.

Tell no lies, claim no easy victories

There are two ways not to suffer from the inferno we are all living in every day. The first suits most people: accept the inferno and become part of it to the point where you don't even see it any more. The second is riskier and requires constant attention and willingness to learn: seek out and know how to recognize whoever and whatever, in the midst of the inferno, is not inferno, and help them last, give them space

When I give food to the poor,they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist

...whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. -THE REBEL

Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a priveleged moment.

After years of 'taking it on the chin,' working families are telling big companies that we will fight for the American dream. This is not just a Teamster victory, this is a victory for all working people

If we are to consider ourselves revolutionaries, we must acknowledge that we have an obligation to succeed in pursuing revolution. Here, we must acknowledge not only the power of our enemies, but our own power as well. Realizing the nature of our power, we must not deny ourselves the exercise of the options available to us; we must utilize surprise, cunning and flexibility; we must use the strength of the enemy to undo him, keeping him confused and off-balance. We must organize with perfect clarity to be utterly unpredictable. When our enemies expect us to respond to provocation with violence, we must react calmly and peacefully; just as they anticipate our passivity, we must throw a grenade.

Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour. - A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past. - I was a man who was lucky enough to have discovered a political theory, a man who was caught up in the whirlpool of Cuba's political crisis . . . discovering Marxism . . . was like finding a map in the forest. - I began revolution with 82 men. If I had [to] do it again, I'd do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action. - I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

A further effect of state terror [is] to drive many people to join the guerrillas….But this too is a victory for the US, since it shifts the struggle away from the political arena, where the US and its clients are weak, to the arena of force and violence, where they reign supreme. Furthermore, as state terror undermines the opportunities for peaceful organization and meaningful political action, its victims either submit or turn to violence themselves; and as state terror mounts they are likely to lose their popular support because they cannot defend the population and because they may be driven to adopt more brutal methods, either in self-defense or as the advocates of force gain positions of dominance in an escalating struggle that is restricted by the outside power to the military dimension. These consequences can then be exploited by the propaganda system to provide retrospective justification for the initial resort to violence that is responsible for them, in the familiar manner already discussed. The dynamics are obvious, and undoubtedly are well-understood by US planners and propagandists, who have ample experience in these matters.

In a more direct response to your question, it seems perhaps not unrealistic to look forward to a mass political movement that will be devoted to badly needed reforms, anti-imperialist and antimilitarist, concerned with guaranteeing minimal standards of health, income, education, industrial safety and conditions of work, and overcoming urban decay and rural misery. Within it, or related to it, there might develop a variety of more radical movements that explore the possibility of dismantling the system of private and state power and democratizing basic social and economic institutions through cooperatives and community and workers' control, and that organize and experiment to these ends. I would hate to see the Left too well organized at this stage (not much fear of this in any event), though one would hope that destructive factional squabbling could be overcome in favour of sympathetic and fraternal disagreement and, where possible, cooperation among those who have rather different ideas about what are, after all, rather obscure and poorly understood matters.

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.

There is substantial evidence that the fear of domestic disruption has inhibited murderous plans. One documented case concerns Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recognized the need that 'sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control.' if they sent troops to Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, and Pentagon officials feared that escalation might lead to massive civil disobedience, in view of the large-scale popular opposition to the war, running the risk of 'provoking a domestic crisis of unprecented proportions.' A review of the internal documents released in the Pentagon Papers shows that considerations of cost were the sole factor inhibiting planners, a fact that should be noted by citizens concerned to restrain the violence of the state. In such cases as these, and many others, popular demonstrations and civil disobedience may, under appropriate circumstances, encourage others to undertake a broader range of conventional action by extending the range of the thinkable, and where there is real popular understanding of the legitimacy of direct action to confront institutional violence, may serve as a catalyst to constructive organization and action that will pave the way to more fundamental change

We live entangled in webs of endless deceit, often self-deceit, but with a little honest effort, it is possible to extricate ourselves from them. If we do, we will see a world that is rather different from the one presented to us by a remarkably effective ideological system, a world that is much uglier, often horrifying. We will also learn that our own actions, or passive acquiescence, contribute quite substantially to misery and oppression, and perhaps eventual global destruction. But there is a brighter side. We are fortunate to live in a society that is not only rich and powerful—and hence, as any student of history would expect, dangerous and destructive—but also relatively free and open, perhaps more so than any other, though this may change if the reactionary jingoists who have misappropriated the term “conservative” succeed in their current project of diminishing civil liberties, strengthening the power of the state, and protecting it from public scrutiny. For those who are wealthy and privileged, a very large sector of a society as rich as ours, there are ample opportunities to discover the truth about who we are and what we do in the world. Furthermore, by international standards the state is limited at home in its capacity to coerce. Hence those who enjoy a measure of wealth and privilege are free to act in many ways, without undue fear of state terror, to bring about crucial changes in policy and even more fundamental institutional changes. We are fortunate, perhaps uniquely so, in the range of opportunities we enjoy for free inquiry and effective action. The significance of these facts can hardly be exaggerated.

'On this issue of human freedom, if you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, that hope is possible, then hope may be justified, and a better world may be built. That's your choice.''

While the U.S. and its allies have armed the neo-fascist elites of the Third World to the teeth, and saturated them with counterinsurgency weaponry and training, long-term elite control of the underlying populations is by no means assured. The abuse of Third World majorities in the empire is so corrupt, inept and visionless, that explosions and loss of control are highly likely in many states over the next several decades. The voiceless majorities can be helped by outsiders in many ways: among them, maximum world-wide exposure of the actual impact of the West on these peoples; strenuous efforts to stem the huge flow of aid and support to official terrorists; and helping to create an ideological and political environment that will make open intervention difficult when explosions do occur.

There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change—and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.

One factor in the betrayal of the promise of socialist revolution has been the willingness of the technical intelligentsia to assimilate itself to a new ruling class, a process that bears comparison to the eager acceptance, in Western democracies, of a role in the expanding state management. But industrial civilization creates a technical intelligentsia that is not only extensive in scale but also increasingly a central element in the work force. Conceivably, this “proletarianization of the intellectuals” may eliminate the role of the professional revolutionary intellectual with his vanguard party that expresses the interests of the inarticulate masses lacking in consciousness. It might, conceivably, make possible a new revolutionary movement in which, as skilled labor, state employment, service and administrative occupations, technology, and science absorb the mass of the work force, intellectual, and manual workers will not be so sharply separated as in the past, and the declining necessity for men to serve as tools of production will blur distinctions that have aborted earlier attempts to place the central institutions of an industrial society under democratic control.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

I’m not a charismatic speaker, and if I had the capacity to be one I wouldn’t. I’m really not interested in persuading people. What I like to do is help people persuade themselves.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.

Several moral issues arise in protests concerning atrocities and violations of human rights. If the purpose of such protests is self-aggrandizement, service to one's state, establishing credentials with one's compatriots or deity, or other self-serving motives, then it is clear how to proceed; join the chorus of protests organized by the government or the media with regard to the iniquity of the current enemies of the state. Such protest may be directed towards genuine abuses of human rights, but it is at the moral level of protest for pay. Suppose some Russian intellectual condemns U.S. behavior in Chile and Vietnam. What he says may be quite true, but we do not admire his courage or moral integrity. Similar remarks apply here, and for the very same reasons.

It is a cheap and cynical evasion to plead that "we must raise our voices" whenever human rights are violated. Even a saint could not meet this demand. A serious person will try to concentrate protest efforts where they are most likely to ameliorate conditions for the victims of oppression. The emphasis should, in general, be close to home: on violations of human rights that have their roots in the policies of one's own state, or its client regimes, or domestic economic institutions (as, e.g., in the case of U.S. investment in South Africa), and in general, on policies that protest may be able to influence. This considerations is particularly relevant in a democracy, where public opinion can sometimes be aroused if circumstances allow a sufficient breach in the conformism of the ideological institutions (the media and academic scholarship), but it applies as well in totalitarian states, that rely in part on popular consent, as most do. It is for this reason that we honor a Medvedev or Grigorenko who denounce the crimes of the Russian state and its satellites, at great personal risk. If, as in these cases, they also condemn the criminal acts of the United States, that is well and good, but far less significant… For privileged Western intellectuals, the proper focus for their protest is at home. The primary responsibility of U.S. citizens concerned with human rights today is on the continuing crimes of the United States: the support for terror and oppression in large parts of the world, the refusal to offer reparations or aid to the recent victims of U.S. violence…

"White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis."

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

The truth is there is an ideological struggle between those who believe that the best way to grow the economy is to give more money to the wealthy, and the Democrats who believe that the wealthy will make more money if average people do better.

Woe betide those who seek to save themselves the pain of mental building by inhabiting dead men’s minds

That we are not a collection of individuals dispersed by the world, but rather a living harmony of colors and voices, a constant shout of desires and thoughts that are born, that grow, that lovingly fertilize in one heart and one will, woven of hope. We call this existence and form of harmonic and collective thinking communal. That we don't resign from being who we are. That we will continue defending our autonomy and defending it. We will also defend everyone who is like us, who want to live differently for their color, their song, their vision of their own lives and freedom, with dignity.

HERE IS THE CORRECT RAGE QUOTE:
"Yes I know my enemies/ They're the teachers who taught me to fight me/ compromise comformity assimulation submission ignorance hypocrisy brutality the elite/ all of which are American dreams" GET IT RIGHT!!!!!

"...The present curriculums, I put my fist in 'em, Eurocentric, every last one of 'em, see right through the red, white, and blue disguise, with lecture, I puncture the structure of lies, installed in our minds and attempting to hold us back, we've got to take it back..."

"Silence, something about silence makes me sick, 'cause silence can be violence, sorta like a slit wrist..."

-“ Causin holes in our spirit causin’ tears and fears, One-sided stories for years and years and years, I’m inferior? Who’s inferior? Yea, we need to check the interior, Of the system that cares about only one culture, And that is why we gotta, TAKE THE POWER BACK!!!

"While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

...years ago I recognised my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free...

I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and misrepresentatives of the masses - you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks

I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it.

There is no "pure" Anarchism. There is only the application of Anarchist principles to the realities of social living. The aim of Anarchism is to stimulate forces that propel society in a libertarian direction.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is part of the Continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed into the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, beacause I am involved in mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. ...Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject.

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

With the affairs of active human beings it is different. Here knowledge of truth alone does not suffice; on the contrary this knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continuously threatened with burial by the shifting sands. The hands of science must ever be at work in order that the marble column continue everlastingly to shine in the sun. To those serving hands mine also belong.

Precious few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved through understanding

It is a tribute to the American people that our leaders perceived that they had to lie to us, it is not a tribute to us that we were so easily misled.

Hope is the basic ingredient of all vitality

"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can still do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do."

"Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it."

We are nothing on earth if we are not, first of all, slaves of the cause of the people, the cause of justice, the cause of liberty.

O my body, make of me always a man who questions.

It's true that since the late nineteenth century Marxist and 'Marxised' revolutionary movements have given special importance to the State apparatus as the stake of their struggle. What were the ultimate consequences of this? In order to be able to fight a State which is more than just a government, the revolutionary movement must possess equivalent politico-military forces and hence must constitute itself as a party, organized internally in the same way as a State apparatus with the same mechanisms of hierarchies and organization of powers. This consequence is heavy with significance. Secondly, there is the question, much discussed within Marxism itself, of the capture of the State apparatus: should this be considered as a straightforward take-over, accompanied by appropriate modifications, or should it be the opportunity for the destruction of that apparatus? You know how the issue of was finally settled. The State apparatus must be undermined, but not completely undermined, since the class struggle will not be brought to an immediate end with the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hence the State apparatus must be kept sufficiently intact for it to be employed against the class enemy. So we reach a second consequence: during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the State apparatus must to some extent at least be maintained. Finally then, as a third consequence, in order to operate these State apparatuses which have been taken over but not destroyed, it will be necessary to have recourse to technicians and specialists. And in order to do this one has to call upon the old class which is acquainted with the apparatus, namely the bourgeoisie. This clearly is what happened in the USSR. I don't claim at all that the State apparatus is unimportant, but it seems to me that among all the conditions for avoiding a repetition of the Soviet experience and preventing the revolutionary process from running into the ground, one of the first things that has to be understood is that power isn't localized in the State apparatus and that nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level, are not also changed.

In the most recent upheaval, the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power—the idea of their responsibility for “consciousness” and discourse forms part of the system. The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself “somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge,” “truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse.”

"Ideologically then, there are three obstacles to effective radical politics. They are 1.respect for the Constitution as a fair and equitable and democratic document; 2. the underlying belief that the US government is fair, acts justly, or would under ordinary circumstances; and 3. a reluctance on the part of most citzens whose values are at odds with those expressed by corporate and state policy to engage in confrontation...while we live on the edge of conflict, we live on the edge of history...when we intercede as 'peacekeepers' and stop the action of protestors because it is confrontational while at the same time we fail to do the same to agents of the state whom with our own eyes we watch commit violence, then we are peackeepers of a particular species. We are peace officers. We are police."

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral

He who is morally impressed by power is never in a critical mood, and he is never a revolutionary character

"Sometimes, when asked the what-do-you-do question, it occurs to me to say that I work for the government. I have a government job, essential to national security. I AM A CITIZEN. Like the Supreme Court judges, my job is for life, and the well-being of my country depends on me. It seems fair to think that I should be held accountable for my record in the same way I expect accountability from those who seek elected office. I would like to be able to say that I can stand on my record and am proud of it."

Spare no efforts to smash down open doors. If you don't smash them, they will bet closed again.

I hope I never lose hope, but if that day comes and I'm sure that I have nothing to expect, nothing to believe in, and that the human condition is doomed to stupidity and crime, then I hope I will be honest enough to kill myself.

Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of my faith.

My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opoortunities as the strongest. . .no country in the world today show any but patronizing regard for the weak. . .Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism. . true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.

"TO THOSE WHO, SEEING THE VICE AND MISERY THAT SPRINGS FROM THE UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND PRIVILEGE, FEEL THE POSSIBILTY OF A HIGHER SOCIAL STATE AND WOULD STRIVE FOR ITS ATTAINMENT"

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

Yesterday we bowed for kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today, we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

I despise anything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity

There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: Those who are afraid to try, and those who are afraid that you will succeed.

The Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. "What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?" Simon shook. "There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the beast." Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words. "Pig’s head on a stick."

And you, are you so forgetful of your past, is there no echo in your soul of your poets' songs, your dreamers' dreams, your rebels' calls?

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

"Telling the truth is always revolutionary" Also found as "the truth is always revolutionary"

It is necessary, with bold spirit and in good conscience, to save civilization…. We must halt the dissolution that corrupts the roots of human society. The bare and barren tree can be made green again. Are we not ready?

Mas vale morir de pie, que vivir de rodillas

Most everybody I see knows the truth but they just don't know that they know it

You hear about 'constitutional rights,' 'free speech,' and the 'free press.' Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red....' You never hear a real American talk like that.

[...] Don't you recognize the irony? The system I oppose affords me the luxury of bitting the hand that feeds. That's exactly why privileged fucks like me should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream until everyone gets everything they need.

"One leader, a thousand slaves, for every throne theres a thousand slaves"

"i never asked to be a citizen."

They will do whatever we let them get away with

While the U.S. and its allies have armed the neo-fascist elites of the Third World to the teeth, and saturated them with counterinsurgency weaponry and training, long-term elite control of the underlying populations is by no means assured. The abuse of Third World majorities in the empire is so corrupt, inept and visionless, that explosions and loss of control are highly likely in many states over the next several decades. The voiceless majorities can be helped by outsiders in many ways: among them, maximum world-wide exposure of the actual impact of the West on these peoples; strenuous efforts to stem the huge flow of aid and support to official terrorists; and helping to create an ideological and political environment that will make open intervention difficult when explosions do occur.

"To me, love, spirituality and life are all the same thing. To me they're all about honoring the circle, and they're just different ways of defining the same understanding. Our society as a whole, because we have placed our love for money above our love for life, has devalued the sacred and devalued love."

Don't waste any time mourning. Organize!

If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.

"There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action."

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

Sweet liberty has but one true defense...THE ABILITY OF THOSE WHO LOVE HER TO WAGE REVOLUTION IN THE EVENT SHE IS THREATENED. Harpo J

" i sncerly belive that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies"

A little revolution, now and then, is a healthy thing. It is as natural as lightning.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!

Militarism. . . is the chief bulwark of capitalism. When it is that militarism is undermined, capitalism will fail.

It is hard to fight an enemy that has outposts in your head.

Don't agonize, organize.

If the ass is protecting the system, ass-kicking should be undertaken, regardless of the sex, ethnicity, or charm of the ass involved.

Nail polish or false eyelashes isn't politics. If you have good politics, what you wear is irrelevant. I don't take dictation from the pig-o-cratic style setters who say I should dress like a middle-aged colored lady. My politics don't depend on whether my tits are in or out of a bra.

“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty...to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is...expressing the very highest respect for law.”

"This discontent is sound and healthy. Nonviolence saves it from degenerating into morbid bitterness and hatred. Hate is always tragic. It is as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. It distorts the personality and scars the soul. Psychiatrists are telling us now that many of the inner conflicts and strange things that happen in the subconscious are rooted in hate. So now they are saying, 'Love or perish.' This is the beauty of nonviolence. It says you can struggle without hating; you can fight war without violence. We must never succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, for if this happens, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos."

My third reason [for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision] moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people

" Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. "

Peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but the existence of justice for all people.

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build up. HUman progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... We are now faced with the fact that TOMORROW is TODAY. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of NOW. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there *is* such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. THIS IS A TIME FOR VIGOROUS AND POSITIVE ACTION."

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society

How many care to seek only for precedents? How many fiery innovators are mere copycats of bygone revolutionaries?

In order that the revolution should be something more than a word, in order that the reaction should not lead us back tomorrow to the situation of yesterday, the conquest of today must be worth defending; the poor of yesterday must not be poor tomorrow.

Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind - even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants. And do your homework.

What is hateful...is not rebellion but the despotism which induces the rebellion; what is hateful are not rebels but the men, who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; they are the men who, having the power to redress wrongs, refuse to listen to the petitioners that are sent to them; they are the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone

"The truth is I was afraid. Not of the physical danger at all, but an awful fright of mixing, of losing myself, of being unknown and lost. I felt inferior. I felt no one would know me there, that all I had been trained to excel in would go unnoticed. I can't describe what I felt, but perhaps it will come near to say that I felt I excelled in competing with others and I knew instantly that these people were NOT competing at all, that they were acting in a strange, powerful trance of movement together...I was marching with a million hands, movements, faces, and my own movement was repeating again and again, making a new movement from these many gestures, the walking, falling back, the open mouth crying, the nostrils stretched apart, the raised hand, the blow falling, and the outstretched hand drawing me in...

My silences have not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

"Health, and that the hunger for tomorrow be a desire to struggle. . .today."

The powerful call us ignorant.

Don't gain the world and lose your soul. Wisdom is better than sliver and gold. (Same as before, but w/ updated source)

Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their brothers and sisters.

If emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal conncurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.

Even though the construction of the future and its completion for all times is not our task, what we have to accomplish at this time is all the more clear: *relentless criticism of all existing conditions*, relentless in the sense that the criticism is not afraid of its findings and just as little afraid of the conflict with the powers that be.

When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer.

Hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.

"America: Socializing the risks, Privatizing the profits, Putting business in the democracy, Taking the democracy out of the business."

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has

When you argue or plead with a Politician, expecting him to suddenly become as smart as required by Law, you will have much greater Assurance in Hope and Fun watching the Melting of the Greenland Ice

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair

I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant

There is always some element of bad form in objecting to the destructive course of events, or indeed, in making it a topic of conversation.

One cannot say that all conservatives are stupid people, one can say that most stupid people are conservative

Define home "not as a comforable, stable, inherited and familiar space, but instead as an imaginative, politically-charged space where the familiarity and sense of affection and commitment lay in shared collective analysis of social injustice as well as a vision for radical transformation."

The corporations are powerful only because we have allowed them to be. In theory, it is we, not they, who mandate the state. But we have neglected our duty of citizenship, and they have taken advantage of our neglect to seize the reins of government. Their power is an artefact of our acquiescence.

I say one evil empire down... one to go.

"The structure of the capitalist enterprise is based upon the exploitation of man by man, so whether this ruler is called 'peronista' or called Christian or whatever else, to the extent that he oppresses me I have the duty to fight, not against him but for my liberation. I have to take away that foot that he puts upon me, not for hatred to him, but for love to him for it harms him to oppress me and it harms me to be oppressed by him"

Historically, political leadership has often been determined, over resistance, by force. As stability takes root, other freedoms can flourish. But leaders are never sure when stability is securely established, and they typically err in the direction of suppressing potential dissenters who do not threaten the regime in the interests of catching all who do. A stable society such as the United States can protect the rights of innocent individuals even at the expense of missing some who would, if they could, threaten society. But in recently stabilized societies, that freedom may be a luxury, since physical security could be undermined if regime-threatening dissidents are not suppressed. And some (if not most) political leaders have a tendency to prolong the period in which they use internal security as a plausible excuse, rather than a real reason, for suppressing dissent. Regrettably, Sen does not tackle the vital question of balancing freedoms against security and stability.

you simply fill the gap, between the upper and lower class, and your faith merely keeps you in line.

Two premises are basic to this political campaign. First, that a basic function of leadership is to generate more leaders, not more followers. Secondly, this political movement is first and foremost movement of thought, not of belief. There is nothing wrong with beliefs but it would be better to have them preceded by thought and followed by action.

The immense hold which ignorance, indifference and inertia have over men's lives is not due in the main to any deficiency in human nature, but to the deliberate, determined efforts of ruling minorities to maintain their authority and perpetuate their power.

If things are not right, we have no business turning aside until we have done our share and more than our share in our efforts to set them right.

"Leave the old and dying America and use your creative energies to help form a new America, which would be demilitarized, more humanistic, where the police are less hostile and closer to the community, where the wealthy are not given unleashed power for the exploitation of the people, and mostly because it's now a matter of life and death, reassert an ecological balance with the environment, which means thhe people in the oil companies and the car companies and the space industry will have to be brought into account, so there will be a new definition of government which has to be closer to the people and less close to special interests which are far more harmful that any revolutionaries.

"Ah but in such an ugly time the ture protest is beauty."

"I believe there is still something inherent in the fibre of America worth saving, and that the fortunes of the entire world may well ride on the ability of young Americans to face the responsibilities of an old America gone mad."

"Charity is no substitute for justice witheld."

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; moderation in principle is always a vice

Trust not in a man's words. The truth is manifest in his actions.

History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming that nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality-if only for an instant-by means of creation.

We must recognize that our alienation is not unique, that it is shared by the majority of the world's peoples. To be ourselves would be to oppose the freezing of history with the mobile features of a living human face.

We are alone at last, like all men, and like them we live in a world of violence and deception, a world dominated by Don No One. It protects us but also oppresses us, hides us but also disfigures us. If we tear off these masks, if we open ourselves up, if--in brief--we face our own selves, then we can truly begin to live and to think. Nakedness and defenselessness are awaiting us. But there, in that "open" solitude, transcendence is also waiting: the outstretched hands of other solitary beings. For the first time in our history, we are contemporaries of all mankind.

The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. Freedom is something you're born with, and then one day someone tries to deny it. The extent to which you resist is the extent to which you are free.

The process of revolution is not that of storming the seats of power, but of creating the environment where the popular notions of society, power and legitimacy, shift out from underneath those seats of power. [Independent media] is a vehicle through which the ideological basis of present power structures can be subverted.

When Bush did come to the state, he favored visits to corporate headquarters over open meetings with voters. [Bush adviser and veteran New Hampshire Republican Tom] Rath defended this practice, saying businesses "are the new town halls."

Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

Three things are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two are beyond our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard

The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.

Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are rather forced upon them from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. They do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace.

We who have a Voice must be a Voice for the Voiceless!

Men will no longer submit merely because their forefathers did so, a reason is demanded for abstaining from claiming one’s rights, and the reasons offered are counterfeit reasons, convincing only to those who have a selfish interest in being convinced. This condition of revolt exists in women towards men, in oppressed nation towards their oppressors, and above all in labor towards capital. It is a state full of danger, as all past history shows, yet also full of hope, if only the revolt of the oppressed can result in victory without too terrible a struggle, and their victory can result in the establishment of a stable social order.

Amid the myths and hysterias of opposing hatreds, it is difficult to cause truth to reach the bulk of the people, or to spread the habit of forming opinions on evidence rather than on passion. Yet it is ultimately upon these things, not upon any political panacea, that the hopes of the world must rest.

Our world can be transformed to a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of hope and joy, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others. Meantime, the world in which we exist has other aims. But it will pass away, burned up in the fire of its own hot passions; and from its ashes will spring a new and younger world, full of fresh hope, with the light of morning in its eyes.

There is something feeble and contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.

There's a certain instinct that a worker has, much more so than some candy-assed storeowner. He understands who's scewing him, but he doesn't understand how to get unscrewed

I swear I way more than half believe it when I say that somewhere love and justice shine.

The citizen's job is to be rude--to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt

A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the street without being knocked down as a common enemy.

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all

To know and not to do is not to know

"They fought when they didn't have to fight, fought when it brought no public glory in their home towns, fought to put a lie to the cynicism that keeps people in darkness. They won't go away. The example of their sacrifice stands up in history for those of us not yet born when they shipped out for a Republic that was mostly a belief in what people could be, in how they could live together. And in a world run by cynics, in a time when caring about someone you've never met is seen as weakness or treachery, how much strength have we taken from the thought of them, how much pride and comfort to be able to say, 'But what about the guys in the Lincoln Brigade?'"

All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident

Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.

The most sacred cow of the press is the press itself.

If we walk away from our children today, they will walk away from us tomorrow.

I were better to be eaten to death with rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion

and I don't care how controversial it makes us. I won't tolerate being insulted. If you piss in my face I'm gonna call it piss. I'm not gonna call it rain.

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of inhumanity

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man

"Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock."

'Every apathetic individual is a brick in a tyrant's throne'

The unexamined life is not worth living.

There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!

For most of my life, I've been active in human rights campaigns, including the movements for trade union democracy and for civil rights. Animal rights, for me, was nothing more than a logical extension of these concerns... It would seem to me that a rational leftist would recognize that the ultimate in exploitation and domination and treating living beings as mere objects for profit is nowhere seen in a purer form than in our relation to animals raised for food

Woe betide that man of power who takes the side of those who have no power

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause. The mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

They said, "You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar."

The outstanding lesson [of the Vietnam War] is that we should never let another Vietnam-type situation arise again. We were too late in recognizing the extent of the subversive threat. We appreciate now that every young [sic] emerging country must be constantly on the alert, watching for those symptoms which, if allowed to develop unrestrained, may eventually grow into a disastrous situation such as that in South Vietnam. We have learned the need for a strong police force and a strong police intelligence organization to assist in identifying early the symptoms of an incipient subversive situation.

That which we are, we are. And if we are to be any better now is the time begin

Zeal without knowlege is fire without light.

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politcians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

When a man is running from his boss Who holds the gun that fires "cost" And people die from being cold Or left alone because they're old And bombs are dropped on fighting cats And children's dreams are run with rats If you complain you disappear Just like the lesbians and queers

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; its institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags - that is a loyalty of unreason…

There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it

In the world there is nothing so submissive and weak as water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men - true nobility is being superior to your former self

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

--Vote with your Feet. --Vote in the Street.

"Talk does not cook rice."--Chinese proverb

Until the lions have their historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Every view of things that is not strange is false.

The magic word before whose power Even the people's masters cower, Flapping their wigs officiously-- Prick up your ears; the word--it is publicity

"There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. VIVID. ALIVE. To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked, by a daring compassion, to what is divine. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebrations. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed WHO THEY REALLY ARE, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough TO BE THAT."

They tell us that here we are free To live our lives as we please To march, write and dissent So long as we do it alone. But say it or do it with comrades united and strong And they'll take you for a long rest With walls of barbed wire for your home.

Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

It is a widely held but grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of our mundane existence.

Well behaved women do not make history.

Stay strong and pay close attention

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown . . . reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency.

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing

It is in the nature of walls that walls should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

You believed once in your own passivity, your own powerlessness, your own spiritual malaise. You are now awakening in the beginnings of a new birth. Not born again, but born for the first time, triumphant and resolute, out of experience and struggle, out of a flowing, living memory, out of consciousness and will, facing, confronting, challenging head-on the contradictions of your lives and the lives of people around you. You believe now in the necessity and beauty of struggle.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue

Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human history; we have infinitely more instances of submission to authority than we have examples of revolt. What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency toward violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people faced with an overwhelming environment of injustice to submit to it. Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.