Prisoners

"It would have been better if we had fought in Italy and Austria which are really at war against us, instead of allowing them to use our unfortunate Slovenians, Croats and Moslems as bait and cannon fodder."

"We are fully aware that war is not the only way to defend our values. But if those values are fundamentally endangered, as is the case today, then war is the only way to defend them. Everything that hinders us in our effort to defend ourselves is an injustice. We did not want this war, it was thrust upon us, like all others. Defending one's people is a holy duty,"

"I have no intention to create greater Serbia, neither to re-establish the former Byzantium. I am only defending my nation and my country."

"We Serbs are the only nation, on this planet, who decided to unite with people who tried to exterminate us and were our enemies."

"We, as the winners [of WW1 & WW2], created a common country [Yugoslavia] with our enemies [Croats & Muslims], who were on the defeated side Central Powers & Axis Powers]."

"All over northern and eastern Bosnia, Serb paramilitaries, the JNA, and Ministry of Interior forces, acting in conjunction, laid siege to towns and villages, driving out Muslims in a firestorm of brutality. On 20 May 1992, General Ratko Mladic, since indicted as a war criminal by the Hague Tribunal, was named commander of the Republika Srpska (that is, the Bosnian Serb Republic) Army. He brought a high level of professional expertise and ruthlessness to the Serb nationalist forces. Everywhere the pattern was the same—artillery barrages that laid waste to people and buildings; sieges that went on sometimes for months, even years, reducing the populations to a starved, diseased, and fearful existence. When Serb nationalist troops entered a town, the suffering became even worse."

"The generations of the past failed to unite Serbia and to establish a common Serbian state, which should include all Serbian national, ethnic and historical territories."

"I can not participate in a conversation if people are portraying me as somebody who is trying to establish greater Serbia. I am not Tsar [king] Dušan."

"Don't be afraid of anything, just take it easy, easy. Let the women and children go first. Thirty buses are coming, we're send you off toward Kladanj. Don't be afraid of anything, nobody is going to do anything to you. Thank you, thank you. Thanks, be safe. Nobody knows anything. Everything is done on my order."

"There are so many! It is going to be a feast. There will be blood up to your knees."

"Here we are, on the eleventh of July of the year 1995, in Serbian Srebrenica. On the eve of yet another great Serb holiday we present this town as a gift to the Serb nation. The moment has finally arrived that, after the revolt against the Dahijas, we will have vengeance against the turks in this place."

"Krle, Krstić, come on. Record that flag. Tear that flag down so it doesn't fly any more. Pull it down. Bravo! Towards Potočari! Towards Potočari and Bratunac! Don't stop, come on! Go in front of me the whole way, come on. Come on, boys, forward!"

"Don't get the idea that I'm one of these goddamn radicals. Don't get the idea that I'm knocking the American system."

"I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man."

"And by the way, I've been indicted more times than Alphonse Capone. He's the most vicious of all gangsters. If he took you to dinner and if you didn't look proper, if you laughed a little bit, he might think you're laughing at him, it's dangerous to laugh – he'd kill you immediately. He was indicted one time. I was indicted four times."

"You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."

"I've been accused of every death except the casualty list of the World War."

"This American system of ours ... call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it."

"This is virgin territory out here for whorehouses."

"Do I do business with Canadian racketeers? I don't even know what street Canada is on."

"Believe me, if I started murdering people, there'd be none of you left."

"Overdo it, and our schizotypalism in the Western religious setting is what we call a "cult," and there you are in the realm of a Charles Manson or a David Koresh or a Jim Jones. You can only do post-hoc forensic psychiatry on Koresh and Jones, but Charles Manson is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. But get it just right, and people are gonna get the day off from work on your birthday for millennia to come."

"While I was working on Downward Spiral, I was living in the house where Sharon Tate was killed. Then one day I met her sister. It was a random thing, just a brief encounter. And she said: "Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house?" For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, "No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred." I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, "What if it was my sister?" I went home and cried that night. It made me see there's another side to things, you know?"

"If Manson lived 2,000 years ago, we might have churches worshiping him now. So it was easy for me to imagine a completely fraudulent scamming huckster named Jesus."

"Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason. Here is a man, yet who as far as the coverage was concerned, appeared to be rather a glamorous figure, a glamorous figure to the young people whom he had brought into his operations."

"In appearance a typical product of the 1960s hippie revolution, Manson's warped and sadistic mind was the complete antithesis of the ideals behind the so-called 'Summer of Love'. Tapping into the fears and prejudices of contemporary America, he harnessed savage bigotry and drug-fuelled decadence to play out his perverted fantasies."

"Charles Manson was a bloody aberration in a decade that preached peace and love. A perverted and pathological fantasist, he used his devious powers of manipulation to snare others into his depraved web of hatred and violence, attracting a small band of twisted devotees who were prepared to commit cold-blooded murder on his command."

"Let's clap our hands for the president and Jesus Christ and did I mention Charlie Manson and everybody else, who was nice."

"Charlie was always preaching love. Charlie had no idea what love was. Charlie was so far from love it wasn't even funny. Death is Charlie's trip. It really is."

"I don't believe you're leaving 'cause me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream."

"Though movies (Taxi Driver for John Hinckley Jr., would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan), books (The Catcher in the Rye for Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s murderer) and songs (Helter Skelter” for Tate-LaBianca murders mastermind Charles Manson) may articulate specific criminals acts, they don’t inspire the person’s desire for violence. Science has proven that in numerous studies. It’s tempting to blame movies, video games and rap music because they often express humanity’s worst impulses, but impulses are not actions for most of us. And for the mentally ill seeking violence, anything can set them off. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel (involuntary celibate) who deliberately drove his van into a crowd in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people, said he was motivated by his resentment toward women for having sexually rejected him in favor of giving “their love and affection to obnoxious brutes.” Should we then demand that studios producing romantic comedies and publishers of romance novels be shamed into contributing to anti-incel causes? The 2017 Las Vegas shooter killed 59 and injured 851 during a country music festival. Should country music bear some responsibility?"

"I don't exist in your world, i'm only what is ... what it is! It is what it is! ... Ten-hut!"

"Changed? I was a changed man when I got out last time, I learned ... I learned ... I learned my lesson well ..."

"I see blood in here every day, every day someone's getting shot, someone's getting cut, someone's getting beat ... i've lived in that all my life woman, that don't wrinkle up my forehead ... you can pile 100 dead bodies up in front of my cell and it don't set me to do nothing ..."

"[W]e'll hold you on the table, and we'll deal this hand to you - hey you got a hippie cult leader - i'm not a hippie cult leader, I never was a hippie, i don't know what a hippie was man ..."

"[Y]ou know, a long time ago being crazy meant something, nowadays everybody's crazy ... so, I mean, you know, like ... you know ... (abrupt) synonymous, I mean, it's an irony man, it's a pair of ducks ... I mean ... are you crazy? ... dressed in black, you think I don't know everything that goes with that black you're dressed in ... [laughs] yeah ... where's your black gloves? ... You got your rings, you think I don't understand your blue rings and your yellow (deliberate garbled speech) ... you think you're anything [deliberate garbled speech] ... yeah yeah yeah yeah ... yeah and then behind that, then you know there's another (deliberately mumbles & fades off)"

"[Y]ou know, it's like you think the second world war is over ... [the] second world war is not over ... d'you understand what i'm telling you ... th'second world war is not over"

"Look here, uh ... see here's another thing you guys don't understand ... you've got an underworld and a overworld ... you guys live in the overworld ... I live in the underworld"

"I'm a hobo a bum, a boxcar and a jug of wine, interview."

"There's nothing wrong with being incompetent. It just means you don't have to do as much."

"I've never killed anyone. I don't need to kill anyone. I think it. I have it here. [points to head]"

"I lived in Hollywood and I had all that, the Rolls Royce and the Ferrari and the pad in Beverly Hills. I had the surf board and the Beach Boys and the bishkis and the Neil Diamond and the ramskam and the Jimmy shriffen [ph.] and the Elvis Presley's best of bestlies and all them guys. The Deana Martins and the Nancy Sinatras and the cops and sovereigns, "Will you do it to me? I hear you do it good honey" and all that kind of "Will you come up to my house later?" So I went through all that and I seen that was a bigger prison than the one I just got out of and I really didn't care to go back in prison. See, prison doesn't begin and end at the gate. Prison is in the mind. It's locked in one world that's dead and dying, or it's open to a world that's free and alive."

"Do you feel blame? Are you mad? Uh, do you feel like wolf kabob Roth vantage? Gefrannis booj pooch boo jujube; bear-ramage. Jigiji geeji geeja geeble Google. Begep flagaggle vaggle veditch-waggle bagga? [ph.]"

"If I wanted to kill somebody, I'd take this book and beat you to death with it, and I wouldn't feel a thing."

"Maybe I should have killed four, five hundred people. Then I would've felt better. Then I would've felt like I really offered society something."

"Death is psychosomatic."

"Have you ever seen the coyote in the desert? Watching, tuned in, completely aware. Christ on the cross, the coyote in the desert — it’s the same thing, man. The coyote is beautiful. He moves through the desert delicately, aware of everything, looking around. He hears every sound, smells every smell, sees everything that moves. He’s in a state of total paranoia, and total paranoia is total awareness."

"I'm probably one of the most dangerous men in the world if I want to be. But I never wanted to be anything but me."

"Anything you see in me is in you. If you want to see a vicious killer, that's who you'll see, do you understand that? If you see me as your brother, that's what I'll be. It all depends on how much love you have. I am you, and when you can admit that, you will be free. I am just a mirror."

"A baby is born into this world in a state of fear. Total paranoia and awareness. He sees the world with eyes not used yet. As he grows up, his parents lay all this stuff on him. They tell him, when they should be letting him tell them. Let the children lead you."