Noam Chomsky // "If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time."
Howard Zinn // "Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves…and the grand thieves are running the country."
James Baldwin // "This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted."
Toni Morrison // "Don’t you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft. There is something distorted about the psyche. It’s a huge waste and it’s a corruption and a distortion. It’s like it’s a profound neurosis, that nobody examines for what it is... If the racist white person, I don’t mean the person who is examining his consciousness...doesn’t understand that he or she is also a race, it’s also constructed, it’s also made, and it also has some kind of serviceability... But when you take it away... If I take your race away...there you are, all strung out and all you got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? Do you still like yourself?... If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem."
William S. Burroughs // "Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biological state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole."
Gil Scott-Heron // "The revolution that goes on in your head, nobody will ever see that."
James Baldwin // "I left this country for one reason only, one reason. I didn’t care where I went...I ended up on the streets of Paris with $40 in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than what had already happened to me here. You talk about making it as a writer by yourself, you had to be able then to turn off all the antenna with which you live because once you turn your back on this society, you may die. You may die. And it’s very hard to sit at a typewriter and concentrate on that if you’re afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me, they released me from that particular social terror which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody... I don’t know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions... You want me to make an act of faith risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America which I have never seen."
J.D. Salinger // "Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
Malcolm X // "They don't know what morals are. They don't try and eliminate an evil because it's evil, or because it's illegal, or because it's immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their existence... So you're wasting your time appealing to the moral conscience of a bankrupt man... If he had a conscience, he'd straighten this thing out with no more pressure being put upon him... We have to change our own mind. You can't change his mind about us. We've got to change our own minds about each other."
Virginia Woolf // "I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual."
David Lynch // "Have a great day everyone."
Bob Dylan // "An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be alright."