The Mass, 2006.
 The Mass, 2006. "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." “There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the [German] people were not brainwashed about gun ownership and had been well armed. ... Gun haters always want to forget the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which is a perfect example of how a ragtag, half-starved group of Jews took 10 handguns and made asses out of the Nazis.” -Theodore Haas, Dachau Survivor. "On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break." - Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007). “Whether the mask be labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our greatest adversary remains the Apparatus- the bureaucracy, the police, the military…the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.” -Simone
Weil, Politics, Spring, 1945; quoted in A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn, 1995, page 412.
"But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government...because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding." -Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974, page 94. “Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” -Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, 1978, page “The struggle of [people]
against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” -Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1979, page“The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by
him who resists it.”
-John Hay, Castilian Days, II, 1872, page 16. “Tyranny cuts off the singer’s head But the voice from the bottom of the well Returns to the secret springs of the earth And rises out of nowhere Through the mouths of the people” -Pablo Neruda “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheel, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” -Mario Savio, Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Sproul Hall, December 2, 1964. ‘‘...To defend oneself, one must be ready to die, and there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.’’ -Alexander Solzhenitsyn “Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.” -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, An Autobiography: Or the Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1925-1929, page 446. "We must be willing in our lifetime to deal with reality. It's not revolution; it's liberation. We want to be free of a value system that's being imposed on us... Liberation --we want to be free. But in order for us to be free we have to assume...our responsibility. We are going to have to struggle for it. We are going to have to work [and be] committed to it. We must never underestimate our enemy. Our enemy is committed against us 24 hours a day. They use 100% of their efforts to maintain their ...status quo. 100% of their effort goes into deceiving us and manipulating us against each other.....We are going to have to start working more realistically with a resistance consciousness, a resistance, something we can pass on as strength to the coming generations--a resistance where organizational ...[and] individual egos don't get in the way, a resistance where the infiltrators and the provacateurs and the liars and the betrayers...do not get in the way. We will not get our liberation if we do not seriously analyze the experiences of our own lifetimes." -John Trudell “The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” -Dante, The Inferno. "You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up. Those 'puny little ants' outnumber us a hundred to one. And if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life! It's not about food. It's about keeping those ants in line." -Hopper, A Bug's Life, 1998. "Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power." -Henry George
“Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth
like dew.
Ye are many- They are few.” -Percy Bysshe Shelley, The
Masque of Anarchy, 1819, "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi "What you gonna do about it, what you gonna do? What you gonna do about it, what you gonna do? Gonna fight it, gonna fight it Gonna fight it, gonna fight it Gonna fight it, gonna fight it" -The Rolling Stones, Ventilator Blues, Exile on Main Street, 1972. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -John F. Kennedy, Address on the first Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, for the diplomatic corps of the Latin American Republics at the White House, March 13, 1962. "Brothers and sisters, if you and I would just realize that once we learn to talk the language that they understand, they will then get the point. You can't ever reach a man if you don't speak his language. If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can't come to him with peace. Why, good night! He'll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. If a man speaks French, you can't speak to him in German. If he speaks Swahili, you can't communicate with him in Chinese. You have to find out what does this man speak. And once you know his language, learn how to speak his language, and he'll get the point. There'll be some dialogue, some communication, and some understanding will be developed." -Malcolm X, After the Bombing / Speech at Ford Auditorium, February 14, 1965. Be the first to post a comment. | ||||||||||||
