Quotes from David Dellinger

Charlie Parker said, 'Jazz comes from who you are, where you've been, what you've done. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.' It's the same with the revolution.

Because I helped organize non-violent protest in Chicago, New York and Washington, I am denied the fundamental freedom to travel to London, even for the purpose of visiting my daughter.

Americans get fooled because we think we're trying to help the peasants down there in El Salvador, even though we're propping up that oppressive government, among the most brutal and militaristic in the world.

It's my perception that more people are actively committed to human familyhood today, and to a holistic relationship with the natural universe, than at any other time in my 71 years.

When people asked me what I thought when Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street, I would say, 'I still feel palpitations of love, even if I've gone in one direction and he's gone in another.'

Out of the warmth and loving nature of my home, I got an impulse of a politics that was very different from my father's.

You want us to be like good Germans, supporting the evils of our decade and then when we refused to be good Germans and came to Chicago and demonstrated, now you want us to be like good Jews, going quietly and politely to the concentration camps while you and this court suppress freedom and the truth. And the fact is I am not prepared to do that.

I enjoy life this way, I enjoy life being in solidarity with the people who are fighting for a better world.

The conflict is not between the people and the antiwar movement, but between the people and the government.

No matter how superficially fair the judge is, he is still the complete autocrat in the courtroom, and he still comes from the ruling class.

A man is just as dead if he dies of malnutrition as of bullets.

Dostoyevsky was an influence - what's his name, the saintly priest in 'The Brothers Karamazov,' Father Zossima... 'Kiss the earth,' he'd say. Love everything.

Prison is what really radicalized me most deeply. I remember thinking, my God, these people did things that were no worse than what other people do. They're just as nice.

I think it's false to believe that anything good is going to start from the top.

We are no longer demonstrators. We are not actors, we are now people committed to the proposition that if the government won't stop the war, we will stop the government.

Very few people choose war. They choose selfishness and the result was war.

The first time I ever came to Washington was to visit Calvin Coolidge in the White House with my father.

My position has always been to avoid violence to avoid provocation.

Let the Third World get some self-determination. Let the Nicaraguans make their own mistakes.

Hemingway was a big influence - 'A Farewell to Arms,' though I disapproved of the later Hemingway.

I think that anybody gradually learns the things that go deeper than his own heart.

Violence makes people commit atrocious evil without even realizing it.

We can vote our hearts and our heads for someone who can win, Bernie Sanders.

This court is in contempt of human life, dignity and justice.