Quotes from Jello Biafra

Later I ran into people that I went to school with that had no tangible memories of things like Watergate ... We were teenagers by then and they don't remember ... but they remember some commercial jingle! Nixon's Watergate was the best reality TV there is and Nixon went DOWN. It breaks my heart, now, that at almost every level of government is an army of Nixons.

Don't hate the media, become the media.

If you go on teaching people that life is cheap, and leave them to rot in ghettos and jails, they may one day feel justified in coming back to rob and kill you. Duh!

We were a minor trend waiting to happen. In 1980 when we were approached by several tables about signing, we said, 'Well, money isn't that important, but we want our artistic control.' And their replay was, 'Of course you can have artistic control, as long as you change your name.' So much for artistic control!

Our biggest national security threat is the environmental destruction of our planet and the arms race with ourselves.

I'm not sure Trump himself is one of these fundamentalist Christians. He just worships himself.

My main measure of success is that nobody owns me.

I think what we are witnessing in this country is the slow but inevitable fall of an empire that got too comfortable. In other words, when people are so interested in feathering their own nests and scamming on everybody else or being as macho as the person on the TV or movie screen and not caring about other human beings, of course things are going to start to crumble and collapse around them--just like it did with Rome or Britain or Egypt or the Aztecs.

Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music ... or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed property owners so brain dead and stupid they won't even see that if you're too goddamn greedy to pay taxes for schools and services, they're not going to be any good any more! And that uneducated time bombs are a very poor investment as a future work force.

I'm for insurrection on three fronts: insurrection in the street, insurrection with the ballot box and insurrection with our wallets. The more we divorce ourselves from paying money for corporate products we don't even need, the less we are a part of the problem.

So basically the understanding on these so-called reissues is that they were done behind my back, without my permission, and the band informed me that I would no longer be paid on them at all. So the people that give their money over for these things might not be the only ones who aren't getting what they're supposed to out of it. They should think twice before picking one of them up.

People like the Koch brothers and the Coors beer family and other tycoons like that -- they're taking the long view, and this is what the long view is. They are diabolically patient. And they've already gotten way more of what they wanted than they ever dreamed possible. This is the real corporate coup, slow but sure. And the tank has been slowly but surely crushing us at least since Reagan, possibly even since Carter. Every once in a while they step on the gas.

It depends on the situation. I mean, on one hand there's the argument that people should be left alone on the other hand, there's the argument to wade in a stop slaughters in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and what we probably should have done in Rwanda.

You can spend the money on new housing for poor people and the homeless, or you can spend it on a football stadium or a golf course.

We need a new law that owners of SUVs are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil.

If you love god, burn a church.

I've been to enough other countries in the world to know what happens when you have socialized single-payer health care. It works. People don't get sick as much. They don't lose their life savings with a catastrophic illness like cancer or AIDS.

That's the way both they and I travel sometimes. Pick road at random, and when it's time to pull over, you pull over and hope you can find a place to crash.

I don't think it's too hippie to want to clean up the planet so you don't wind up dying of some kind of cancer when you're 45 years old. It enrages me that these big cancer-research organizations can't be bothered to man the front lines of environmental protest.

For every prohibition you create you also create an underground.

Don't hate the media; become the media.

I enjoy getting people angry and getting underneath their skin, especially people who don't think.

a prank a day keeps the dog leash away.

If I go without rock for too long, I feel depressed.