Mario Savio (1964–1965)
It is a lot easier to become angry at injustices done to other people than at injustices done to oneself. The former requires a lower degree of political consciousness, is compatible with a higher political boiling point. You become slowly, painfully aware of those things which disturb you in the ways society oppresses you by taking part in activities aimed at freeing and helping others. There is less guilt to suffer in opposing the arbitrary power exercised over someone else than in opposing the equally unjust authority exercised over yourself. . . .
And this is so because people do find it easier to protest injustices done to others: even adverting to injustice done oneself is often too painful to be sustained for very long. When you oppose injustice done others, very often—symbolically sometimes, sometimes not so symbolically—you are really protesting injustice done to yourself. . . . It is not as easy to see what is oppressing the subject as to see what is oppressing the others.
—From “Berkeley Fall: The Berkeley Student Rebellion of 1964” printed in The Free Speech Movement and the Negro Revolution, “News & Letters,” July 1965.
I have to say that for me the deepest free speech quote is what was attributed to Diogenes. And he said, “The most beautiful thing in the world is the freedom of speech.” And those words are in me, they’re sort of burned into my soul, because for me free speech was not a tactic, not something to win for political. . . . To me, freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is. If you cannot speak . . . I mean, that’s what marks us off. That’s what marks us off from the stones and the stars. You can speak freely. It is almost impossible for me to describe. It is the thing that marks us as just below the angels. I don’t want to push this beyond where it should be pushed, but I feel it.
—From an interview by Douglas Gillies, December 1994.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
—From a Free Speech Movement sit-in speech at Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley, December 3, 1964.
I am not a political person. My involvement in the Free Speech Movement is religious and moral. . . . I don’t know what made me get up and give that first speech. I only know I had to. What was it Kierkegaard said about free acts? They’re the ones that, looking back, you realize you couldn’t help doing. . . .
America may be the most poverty-stricken country in the world. Not materially. But intellectually it is bankrupt. And morally it is poverty-stricken. But in such a way that it’s not clear to you that you’re poor. It’s very hard to know you’re poor if you’re eating well. . . .
As for ideology, the Free Speech Movement has always had an ideology of its own. Call it essentially anti-liberal. By that I mean it is anti a certain style of politics prevalent in the United States: politics by compromise—which succeeds if you don’t state any issues. You don’t state issues, so you can’t be attacked from any side. You learn how to say platitudinous things without committing yourself, in the hope that somehow, that way, you won’t disturb the great American consensus and somehow people will be persuaded to do things that aren’t half bad. You just sort of muddle through. . . .
If you accept that societies can be run by rules, as I do, then you necessarily accept as a consequence that you can’t disobey the rules every time you disapprove. That would be saying that the rules are valid only when they coincide with your conscience, which is to insist that only your conscience has any validity in the matter. However, when you’re considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgment of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort. Then you’ve got to decide whether this is one of the things which, although you disagree, you can live with. Only you can decide; it’s openly a personal decision. Hopefully, in a good society this kind of decision wouldn’t have to be made very often, if at all. But we don’t have a good society. We have a very bad society. We have a society which has many social evils, not the least of which is the fantastic presumption in a lot of people’s minds that naturally decisions which are in accord with the rules must be right—an assumption which is not founded on any legitimate philosophical principle. In our society, precisely because of the great distortions and injustices which exist, I would hope that civil disobedience becomes more prevalent than it is.
—From an interview by Jack Fincher, “The University Has Become a Factory,” Life Magazine, February 26, 1965.
Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Berkeley, California, 1965
It is a bleak scene, but it is all a lot of us have to look forward to. Society provides no challenge. American society in the standard conception it has of itself is simply no longer exciting. The most exciting things going on in America today are movements to change America. America is becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment. The “futures” and “careers” for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers’ paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown that they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable and irrelevant.
—From “An End to History,” Humanity, no. 2, December 1964.
We committed the unpardonable sin of being moral and being successful.
—Quoted in A. H. Raskin, “The Berkeley Affair: Mr. Kerr vs. Mr. Savio & Co.,” New York Times Magazine, February 14, 1965.
All quotes from Lynne Hollander Savio, excluding those from Life Magazine (1965) and New York Times Magazine (1965), reprinted with permission.