Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.
People should go where they are not supposed to go, say what they are not supposed to say, and stay when they are told to leave.
You can’t be neutral on a moving train.
But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.
I have no regrets about my political activity, only that I sometimes got carried away with it and didn’t find the right balance between obligations to my family and my need to be involved in social movements.
In war, good guys always become bad guys.
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.