Quotes from Tom Hodgkinson

Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.

There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m.

Career is just posh slavery.

Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it's good for business. Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food, so the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away.

Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.

Existuje poÅ¡etilá pÃ…â"¢edstava, že nemá cenu nÄ›co dÄ›lat, pokud v tom nejste absolutnÄ› nejlepÅ¡í, což vede k tomu, že vÄ›tÅ¡ina z nás nedÄ›lá v?bec nic.

Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant and nothing matters. All of man's striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.

It's senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are .

Beauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness.

We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.

We need to be responsible for ourselves; we must create our own republics. Today we hand over our responsibility to the boss, to the company, to government, and then blame them when everything goes wrong.

Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse.

Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?

We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest 'must-haves', whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they 'have' to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers.

Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?