Quotes About Resistance

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. . .

What if these different despised groups—the Indians, the slaves, the poor whites—should combine?

The Albany police chief, after one of the mass arrests, was taking the names of prisoners lined up before his desk. He looked up and saw a Negro boy about nine years old. "What's your name?" The boy looked straight at him and said: "Freedom, Freedom.

patroonship

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

Existence is violent, I exist, therefore I'm violent. . . in that way.

That is often the way of the oppressor. He cannot understand the simple fact that people want to be free. So, when a man resists oppression, they pass it off by calling him "crazy" or "insane.

During the five years since the Party had been formed, it always seemed that time was measured not in days or months or hours but by the movements of comrades and brothers in and out of prison and by the dates of hearings, releases, and trials. Our lives were regulated not by the ordinary tempo of daily events but by the forced clockwork of the judicial process (330)

Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.

Waddya want me to do? through my sling shot at him?

In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.

Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.

All energy flows according to the whims of the great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him.

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.

There's a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to. It's a goddamned luxury, and if I were you, I'd take advantage of it while you can.

In a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome:

Then there was organ music, a sort of feverish dirge, and then I was stepping out of my shorts and into the shower with Chenault. I remember the feel of those soapy little hands washing my back, keeping my eyes tightly shut while my soul fought a hopeless battle with my groin, then giving up like a drowning man and soaking the bed with our bodies.

Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.

Don't worry, boys, we'll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever - Saul Alinsky to his staff shortly before his death, June 1972.

Yeah, I guess I am," said one. "But you're looking at one loser who's going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.

Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine.

At the Tourist Bureau they talk about the cooling trade winds that caress the shores of Puerto Rico every day and night of the year—but Nelson Otto was a man the trade winds never seemed to touch.

I don't really care if people think we're bad," said another. "I think this is what really keeps us going. We fight society and society fights us. It doesn't bother me.