Some of my favorite writers...
They'll promise you absolution from the murders you'll commit
In the name of god and country they can get away with it
They fill you full of orders and promise you rewards
Like busting up your family by sending you abroad
A holiday in Germany or Iceland or Hong Kong
Making money being useless well it seems it can't go wrong
But then it's off to Northern Ireland where you'll practice what they preached
You'll shoot to keep yourself alive and kill to keep the peace
And then it won't be so much fun as you hear the wounded crying
Cos before they couldn't speak English and you didn't know what they were saying
But when the children call you "Bastard" it will make you think again
When you cannot tell the difference between animals and men
Animals don't wear uniforms but they kill as much as you
But the army kills for money and animals kill for food
It's the basest degradation in the name of what is right
Become something you never were and regret it til you die
Cos your father will tell you "Sonny, you must do as you are told"
And you'll say the same thing to your kids when you're 32 years old
And unless you can react against the brainwash from the start
Your government will rule your mind and your mind will rule your heart
You'll conform to every social law and be the system's slave
From birth to school to work to death, from the cradle to the grave.....
-Dick Lucas
We've had problems from self-appointed Gods from Bishops to MPs.
They've tried to ban our records saying that we're a threat to decent society.
Fuck them. I hope we are.
What kind of depraved idiot thinks they can silence others by denying them their voice?
For fucks sake, who are these lobotomists?
As if walls only had one side.
Whispered intimacies might not get through,
But cries of anguish know no barriers.
But how long do we shout for?
Denied the airwaves, we trust in the wind to carry what we say.
But sometimes we've found ourselves shouting into the wind
When we should have been confiding in each other.
It seems so absurd that we are denied the chance of ever being truly free.
The terrible inequalities of the peoples of this earth
Make freedom at best a dream, at worst an insulting privilege.
What space is there for self-expression and personal development
When over half the world's population is starving?
There are so many things that might have been done,
But rooted on this spot in the desire to find solution,
There's little to see and feel but the sighing and dying of our world.
But for suffering we might have been a part of it rather than apart from it.
Making the compromises,
Brave fronts, deceitful disguises. What did you know? What did you care?
What did you know? What did you care?
Turning a blind eye to the lies just to keep it all together,
But sometimes when I'm alone like this I wonder whether it's worth it.
Smiling and socialising.
Endless philosophising. What did you know? What did you care?
What did you know? What did you care?
Surface agreements, statements of fact, trying to prove we can do it,
But sometimes when I'm alone like this I wonder just who can see through it.
Bargains and sacrifices.
Cheap tricks, cheaper devices. What did you know? What did you care?
What did you know? What did you care?
Holding the vision, but losing our sight, endlessly searching solution,
But sometimes when I'm alone like this I wonder how much it's just institution.
What did you know? What did you care?
What did you know? What did you care?
What did you know? What did you care?
What did you know? What did you care?
Anarchy's become another word for 'got 10 cents to spare?' What did you know? What did you care?
Another way of saying 'I'm O.K., sod you out there'. What did you know? What did you care?
Another token tantrum to cover up the fear. What did you know? What did you care?
Another institution, another cross to bear. What did you know? What did you care?
etc. etc.
-Steve Ignorant
"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."
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media."
"As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss."
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."
"Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way."
"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
"I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system."
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."
"Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony."
"The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history."
"We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others."
"You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it."
-Noam Chomsky
"Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony."
"Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian."
"Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there."
"If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus."
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
"No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time."
"No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure."
"No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action."
"On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable."
"Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other."
"Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think."
"The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul."
"The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice."
"To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character."
"When we can't dream any longer we die."
-Emma Goldman
"Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom."
"In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and charitable acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained."
"People are never free of trying to be content."
-Murray Bookchin
I wish I had time for more......