Free Speech Activists

"Racial solidarity wasn't a working concept in my southern-California hometown. Most people barely had last names, much less ethnic identities. I grew up feeling about as much connection to nineteenth-century slave owners as I did to bus drivers in Helsinki or astronomers in Tirana. We're all capable of getting sunburned. That's it."

"It's a good thing Al Gore has an unappealing demeanor, or George W. Bush would be in real trouble. Bush delivered a mediocre performance at the first presidential debate in Boston. For the first half an hour he appeared nervous. Several times he seemed to lose his train of thought in mid-sentence. Though he relaxed as the night progressed, his remarks often lacked focus. He left Gore's endless attacks on the "wealthiest one percent of Americans" essentially unchallenged. He offered no defense of his own pro-life views, allowing Gore, a genuine extremist on abortion, to sound like the candidate with the mainstream position. He even let Gore interrupt him, repeatedly. Bush was not impressive. Happily for Republicans, Gore was far worse. If George W. Bush is elected president, it will be to a great extent because millions of undecided voters entered the voting booth, considered the phrase "President Gore," and shuddered."

"I have a lot of trouble writing or doing anything unless the pressure is on . . . If left to my own devices, I'd spend a lot of time playing with my kids and my dogs."

"The wonderful thing is we're allowed to say what we think . . . Your stories can be more true, more honest, more direct. If a person at a press conference says something I think is ludicrous, I get to say it's ludicrous . . . You try not to distort the truth because someone you're profiling you think is on the right side of abortion or trade or any other issue. That would be dishonest."

"I thought I'd be ragged for writing a puffy piece. My wife said people are going to think you're hunting for a job in the Bush campaign."

"[[Grover Norquist|[Grover] Norquist]] is a mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep . . . an embarrassing anomaly, the leering, drunken uncle everyone else wishes would stay home . . . [He] is repulsive, granted, but there aren't nearly enough of him to start a purge trial."

"Children born with Down Syndrome are not vegetables, nor are their lives demonstrably not worth living."

"All you kiddies remember to lay off the needle drugs, the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon."

"When the X500 revolution comes, your name will be lined against the wall and shot."

"If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody."

"How many of you have broken no laws this month?"

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

"Abbie Hoffman was one of the first Americans to fully appreciate the possibilities and the importance of living in what was becoming a media age. He was the New Left’s clown, not because he was clownish, but because in a very calculated way he understood that the New Left was in need of a clown, that a clown could publicize their issues, that a clown was not ignored. Above all, Abbie Hoffman did not want to be ignored. And like all good clowns, he was very funny. He was a master of the put-on, and those who understood put-ons laughed while the others joined the television cameras waiting when he promised to spin and levitate the Pentagon, not understanding why he was not in the least bit embarrassed, or the slightest bit disappointed, when he failed to do so."

"Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger."

"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. When all today's isms have become yesterday's ancient philosophy, there will still be reactionaries and there will still be revolutionaries. No amount of rationalization can avoid the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on the planet. I still believe in the fundamental injustice of the profit system and do not accept the proposition there will be rich and poor for all eternity."

"There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning. I think I've learned that lesson twice now. The essence of successful revolution, be it for an individual, a community of individuals, or a nation, depends on accepting that challenge."

"The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain't going."

"Free speech is the right to shout "Theater!" in a crowded fire."

"A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station, not the factory. It concentrates its energy on infiltrating and changing the image system."

"My critique of democracy begins and ends with this point. Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce."

"It's ridiculous to talk about a revolution without a few words on guns. If you haven't been in the army or done some hunting, you probably have a built in fear against guns that can only be overcome by familiarizing yourself with them."

"Amerika is just another Latin dictatorship. Those who have doubts should try the minimal experience of organizing a large rock festival in their state, sleeping on some beach in the summer or wearing a flag shirt. Ask the blacks what it's been like living under racism and you'll get a taste of the future we face. As the repression increases so will the underground - deadly groups of stoned revolutionaries sneaking around at night and balling all day."

"Dealing, although dangerous, is a tax-free way of surviving even though it borders on work."

"Those who say a demonstration should be concerned with education rather than theater don't understand either and will never organize a successful demonstration, or for that matter, a successful revolution."

"Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they'll tell you it's to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks."

"Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity. Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn't allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power."

"To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral."

"It's universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get beyond the-one-to-one level and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-buinsess, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgement to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person's crime is another person's profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals an how much. I always wanted to put together an outlaw handbook that would help raise consciousness on these points while doing something about evening the score. There was also the challenge of testing the limits of free speech."

"It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail."

"It's in those moments that you start to think about being white and male and over thirty and too smart for your own fuckin good. You start to get pretty down in the dumps sometimes. Besides, every group was into calling the other an imposter and fights were breaking out all over the place. The left was moving into Stalinism and the hippies were moving to the country (as usual). It was mighty lonely on the fence."

"Every group was broke cause the liberal bulge that used to support most radical causes was off on some other trip, playing around with anti-ABM campaigns and sending food to Biafra. Even though they wept and shed some blood in the streets of Chicago, they were gone for good - gone with their money. Our revolution was becoming too radical or crazy or violent or young. We were fuckin up their cocktail parties and it mattered not the blood we were shedding or the growing fascism in the country. New ways had to be found to get bread cause the days of the mailings and benefits were over. In fact, for the Yippies, they had never even begun."

"For a revolution, in order to be a true revolution, must be a world revolution. To achieve that world revolution, you the children of the Yankees must lend a hand. You must vomit forth your cynicism in the streets of your cities. You must mount an unrelenting attack on everything the bastards that rule your country hold dear. You must refuse to serve in their armies, you must reject the heroin offered in their universities, you must become clogs in their productive machines."

"Your universities teach you to be eternal cynics, a cynicism that can be only drowned in alcohol and diet pills and psychoanalysts and golf. Forget your cynicism. There is not one who has more respect for life than a revolutionist."

"It's July fifteenth, 2 a.m. on a farm somewhere in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's a beautiful warm night, filled with a starry blue sky waiting for the astronauts to violate its silence. Lying on your back you can look up and repeat all the old hippy cliches to yourself about dropping out and heading for the country. Why not? After all, on a clear night in New York City up on my roof I can sometimes see two stars and Anita jokes about how they must be attached to a long electric wire that comes out of the Con Ed building across the street, for there are no clear nights in New York. There is an underground newspaper conference going on at the farm. It's a good place to start describing some of the changes that have gone down in the hop community over the past few years. For the underground press is the molder and chronicler of the amorphous body of long -haired freaks you see sticking their tongue out at you in the TV news at night or luring your daughter to a rock-and-roll dance in the park."

"LONG LIVE THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION!"

"The Beatles may be more popular than Jesus but heavy cats like Chairman Mao, Uncle Ho, and beautiful long-haired Che Guevara are more popular than The Beatles."

"God, I'd like to fuck Janis Joplin!!"

"Some day we too will fly off in some communal capsule, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Hippies, liberated women, young workers on the line, and G.I.'s sitting in stockades because they don't want to go to Vietnam. There will be a whole mess of us laughing and getting stoned on our way to OUTERSPACE, and the first thing we're gonna do out there is to rip down that fuckin flag on the moon."

"One tries not to be cynical; after all, they are jumping around on the fuckin moon and no matter what you think of PIG NATION, you have to admit that it dies have a good special effects department."

"WOODSTOCK NATION is built on ELECTRICITY. It is our energy, music, politics, school, religion, play, battleground and our sensuality. I hesitate only in using the word Morality, for Morality means soul and ELECTRICITY lack soul but so too does the wood pen I scratch against the yellow pad. Morality rests in God's imagination and if we see ourselves as gods I guess we alone make those choices. Moral decisions never rest in our tools, be they electricity or pencils, flowers, or guns."

"I think this is a pile of shit, while John Sinclair rots in prison."

"In Woodstock Nation there are no writers—only poet-warriors."

"The only way to support a revolution is to make your own."

"I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars."

"The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution."

"TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE"

"You ask, "What about the innocent bystanders?" But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent."

"THE KEY TO ORGANIZING AN ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY IS TO ORGANIZE PEOPLE AROUND WHAT THEY CAN DO AND MORE IMPORTANTLY WHAT THEY WANT TO DO."

"STRUCTURE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN CONTENT IN THE TRANSMISSION OF INFORMATION. It is the same as saying "the medium is the message.""

"I can only related to Chicago as a personal anarchist, a revolutionary artist. If that sounds egotistical, tough shit. My concept of reality comes from what I see, touch, and feel, The rest, as far as I'm concerned, didn't happen. If it did, so what, then it happened. Great! I am my own leader I make my own rules. The revolution is whereever my boots hit the ground. If the Left considers this adventurism, fuck 'em, they are a total bureaucratic bore."