GOVERNMENT, THE LEGAL SYSTEM, school, organized religions, the media, corporations, various economic concerns . . . there are a number of powerful, pervasive institutions that want to control you. It's either their overt purpose or a by-product of their very existence. In order to not disintegrate, they must have at least a piece of you, if not all of you, for at least part of your life, if not all of it. They might not have been created for nefarious purposes, but this is nonetheless the effect they often have. They flatten and deaden. They exploit and punish. They're never happy with the amount of power they have; they always seek to expand the breadth of their reach and the strength of their grip. This has not gone unnoticed by many of the finest and bravest minds throughout history. . . .
No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.
Re-examine all you have been
told at school or church or
in any book, dismiss whatever
insults your own soul.
—Walt Whitman
I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. . . . If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
No matter what your fight, don't be ladylike! God Almighty made women, and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men . . .
It is honorable to be accused by those who deserve to be accused.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favour.
These laws of yours are no different
from spiders' webs. They'll restrain
anyone weak and insignificant who
gets caught in them, but they'll
be torn to shreds by people with
power and wealth.
—Anacharsis
The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.
The more laws, the more offenders.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. . . . Distrust all those who talk much of their justice.
It is fairly obvious that those who favor the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who do not.
All Crimes are safe, but hated Poverty.
This, only this, the rigid Law pursues.
Mendoza: I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.
Tanner: I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
There is something wrong with the creation of this world, because the rich people think that they are the benefactors of the poor, but in fact those rich are fed and dressed by the work of these poor and live in luxury created for them by the poor.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
Advertising has us chasing cars and
clothes, working jobs we hate so we can
buy shit we don't need.
—Chuck Palahniuk
The material on TV is called “programming” for a reason; it's designed to program us as we sit passively in our seat.
Puritanism:
The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
If the words “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
Outlawing drugs in order to solve drug problems is much like outlawing sex in order to win the war against AIDS.
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
There is no history of mankind,
there are only many histories of all
kinds of aspects of human life.
And one of these is the history of
political power. This is elevated into
the history of the world.
—Karl Popper
What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other peoples' decisions for them?
Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
The stuff they teach you at school is just so they can own you.
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
I like quoting Einstein. Know why? Because nobody dares contradict you.
Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.
It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.
As far as I have seen, at school as well as at home they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Children who live surrounded by rules, instead of learning about principles, end up becoming adept at getting around rules, finding the loopholes in rules, disguising non-compliance, or deflecting blame for non-compliance (i.e. lying about what they did). These are the skills that they then bring into adult life.
All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
Religions get lost as people do.
—Franz Kafka
Religions are intermittently too interesting, wise, and consoling to be abandoned to “believers” alone.
Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.
The language of religion is divisive partly because it tries to state what cannot be stated.
And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that?