Protest, Resistance and Revolution

I who have cursed

I consider that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.

This is what extremely grieves us, that a man who never fought Should contrive our fees to pilfer, one who for his native land Never to this day had oar, or lance, or blister in his hand.

[ Socrates speaking, describing the charge against him :] Socrates is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.

No justice, no peace.

 

“I will not kiss your f.ing flag”

Religion is … the opium of the people.

Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

If you don’t begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you are a red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed… here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

Who will remember, passing through this gate, The unheroic dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate— Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

It is computed, that eleven Thousand Personshave, at several Times, suffered Death, ratherthan submit to break their Eggs at the smallerEnd. Many large Volumes have been publishedupon this Controversy: But the Books of the Big-Endians have been long forbidden, andthe whole Party rendered incapable by Law ofholding Employments.

We preserve the so-called peace of acommunity by deeds of petty violence everyday. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs!Look at the jail! Look at the gallows!

Savagely is necessary ever}' four or five hundred years in order to bring the world back to life. Otherwise the world would die of civilization.

The Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children.

 

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. refusing to be drafted to fight in Vietnam

If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

The Klan is actually as thoroughly American as Rotary or the Moose. Its childish mummery is American, its highfalutin bombast is American, and its fundamental philosophy is American. The very essence of Americanism is the doctrine that the other fellow, if he happens to be in a minority, has absolutely no rights—that enough is done for him when he is allowed to live at all.

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

Revolution . . . ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, fromhaving heard what had been done beforecarried to a still greater excess the refinementof their inventions, as manifested to thecunning of their enterprises and the atrocityof their reprisals. Words had to change theirordinary meaning and to take that which wasnow given them.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give thewhite man nothing else. But the fact is, you gotto give ’em something. Either your money, your land, your woman, or your ass.