We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.
Education is a system of imposed ignorance.
For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
It’s not radical Islam that worries the US – it’s independence.
That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything.
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.