Protest, Resistance and Revolution

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!

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at onceeffectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait until theyconstitute a majority of one, before they sufferthe right to prevail through them. I think thatit is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighborsconstitutes a majority of one already.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let itgo: perchance it will wear smooth,—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injusticehas a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or acrank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will notbe worse than the evil; but if it is of such anature that it requires you to be the agent ofinjustice to another, then, I say, break the law.Let your life be a counter-friction to stop themachine.

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.

Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements ofthis last convulsion.

I learned three things in Zurich during thewar. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re eithera revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re notyou might as well be an artist as anything else.Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you mightas well be a revolutionary . . . I forget the thirdthing.

There are times when a woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

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.

Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.

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!

Poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.

The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

We’re especially not going to tolerate these attacks from outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes, and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.

I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day.

You talk, you talk, that’s all you know how to do.

The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

[ 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.

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.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

My own contribution was: 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production ; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat ; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society .

[ Responding to a beach club telling him he couldn’t join because he was Jewish :] My son’s only half Jewish. Would it be all right if he went in the water up to his knees?