The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.
See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.
It is quite possible – overwhelmingly probable, one might guess – that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.
How it is we have so much information, but know so little?
If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.
Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.
In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.
Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?
The term physical is just kinda like an honorific word, kinda like the word ‘real’ when we say ‘the real truth’. It doesn’t add anything, it just says ‘this is serious truth’. So to say that something is ‘physical’ today just means ‘you gotta take this seriously’.
Institutional structures are legitimate insofar as they enhance the opportunity to freely inquire and create, out of inner need; otherwise, they are not.
La libertad, cuando no hay oportunidades, es un regalo envenenado; y negarse a proporcionar estas oportunidades es un acto criminal.
In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what it’s doing. There is only one way to do it – become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you become a raving racist in self-defense, you’ve lost your capacity to understand what’s happening.
The public must be reduced to passivity in the political realm, but for submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be entrenched in the realm of belief as well.
I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.
The workers who built the settlements and produced the export crops may now enjoy their freedom in the world’s largest prison.58.
Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.