Music can be a distraction and an escape. Sometimes a welcome escape. You need it. But music can also serve a very important social function because music can do things that mere prose, mere ordinary political agitation can’t do.
Education can, and should be, dangerous.
We all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas.
I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason -that history is a protective armor against being misled.
War itself is the enemy of the human race.
Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the unnoticed heroes of the present.
I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
Even if you assume presidents were democratically elected they still have no right to keep secrets from the American people.
The establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain it’s control, kill us.
If you want to end terrorism, you have to stop being terrorists.
They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
Very important thing to keep in mind, that when justice comes and when injustices are remedied, they’re not remedied by the initiative of the national government or the politicians. They only respond to the power of social movements.
The Roman Empire came to an end, but the Roman people didn’t come to an end, so I see the American Empire coming to an end just as other empires have come to an end.
How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?
There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.
We better rethink the position of the United States in the world and whether we want to be an empire. Being an empire puts all of us in jeopardy. The American Empire, while it was just wreaking havoc on other nations, didn’t bother us.
Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory.
Will Iraq be a democracy? The question is, ‘Will America be a democracy?’