Quotes About Resistance

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

It's like squeezing tripe: nothing comes out,' he said, meaning the Colasberna brothers, their partners, the town in general and Sicily as a whole.

I often feel I am being burned at the stake just because I have always refused to give up that wonderful strange power I have inside me that becomes manifested when I am in harmonious communication with some other inspired being.

For the time being there is only one alternative: to be the hammer or the anvil.

From the very beginning, "witch" has been a synonym for "the Other." Witches are women when the cultural norm is male; they are pagan when the cultural norm is Christian; they are spiritual when the cultural norm is materialist; they become a religion as the cultural norm turns secular; they are healers when anxiety about the medical establishment is an issue; they are environmentalists when big business has bought the government; they are magic in the world of science.

History, in the hands of those who have the most to gain from change, is a formidable weapon. That's why colonizers and imperialists always burned and destroyed the historical accounts of those they conquered. They revise history to parrot one message over and over again, "the way things are now is the way they've always been". The meaning is clear and demoralizing: Don't even think about fighting for change.

The powers who controlled the United States didn't want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up.

Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. (...) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice.

The white man hated to hear anything about spirits because spirits were already dead and could not be tortured and butchered or shot, the only way the white man knew how to deal with the world. Spirits were immune to the white man's threat...s and to his bribes of money and food. The white man only knew one way to control himself or others and that was with brute force.

You see, dear reader, so much of what's doled out as punk merely amounts to saying I suck, you suck, the world sucks, and who gives a damn which is, er, ah, somehow insufficient. Don't ask me why; I'm just an observer, really. But any observer could tell that, to put in in terms of Us vs. Them, saying the above is exactly what They would want you to do, because it amounts to capitulation.

Yes, or no, is the hinge on which everything turns. Shall I yield and dishonor God, or shall I resist and triumph in His might? There is no possible compromise; for compromise with sin is itself the most insidious form of sin. No man can pass through these crises, and be after them what he was before. He has met God face to face, and he must either be the better or the worse for that experience.

Read the books they don't want you to. That's where the good stuff is.

No deeply-rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse argument. Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, (Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,) Black body swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic -- to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies -- those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

I mean, the more a man was in the Devil's power, the less he would be aware of it, on the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he's drunk.

Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.

If the Eloquent peasant finally obtained justice, as seems indicated at the point where the document breaks off, it was only, we should remember, after he had been teased and tormented, even flogged, by his betters merely to increase their amusement over his delightful impudence in standing up for his rights and answering back.

Each one of us, as long as life stirs in him, may play a part in extricating himself from the power system by asserting his primacy as a person in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate him from the domination of the pentagon of power.

But now the forces challenging the power complex have a special advantage that derives from the advances in technology: its members, however separated in space, are united in time, are united in space through books, discs, taped records, and frequent, quickly arranged face-to-face meetings. Hence resistance to the megamachine is no longer pathetically sporadic, but increasingly coordinated through constant inter-viewing as well as inter-communication.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

Despite offers, I have never felt the urge to try to make it in Hollywood.