People From California

"People who love in glass houses should pull down the blinds."

"Misery loves company but company does not reciprocate."

"Be held truthful that your lies may count."

"The wages of gin is breath."

"Where there's a will, there's a law suit."

"Many are called, but few get up."

"The son-of-a-bitch would shoot me just to make book on which way I'd fall!"

"An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing."

"There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns — different states, if possible — and write each other letters once a year."

"We went inside and I kissed her. Not only my temperature rose."

"Every witness has his own way of creeping up on the truth."

"I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves."

"When your income passes a certain point you lose touch. All of a sudden the other people look like geeks or gooks, expendables."

"The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape."

"Money costs too much."

"You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?" "I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people."

"Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she'd been playing tricks with her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid."

"They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted."

"The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake."

"Nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean wouldn't cure."

"You know, those people - I think they should appreciate that we're only targeting their property. Because frankly I think it's time to start targeting them."

"What I'm continuing to do is cutting out the equation that wastes the most amount of time — and that is working within the system."

"In my years past I have argued that economic sabotage was an appropriate tactic for our time. Like all strategists I have also been forced to recognize that times have changed and it is now my belief that the movements to protect earth and animals have achieved enough with this strategy to now consider an approach that does not compromise objectives, but increases the likelihood of real social change. Let our opposition who believe in violence carry the burden for its justification, but let those who believe in peace and love practice a way of life that our society sorely needs now more than ever."

"Don't ask me how to burn down a building. As me how to grow watermelons or how to explain nature to a child. that is what I want to grow old doing. Please afford me this."

"You're damn right when you say I've shown people how to make a firebomb, I've done my time for my crimes, and I should be able to talk about them."

"I’m a member of the Pascua Yaqui Nation and as an indigenous person, the fur trade represents so much more to me than just animal abuse. It represents cultural genocide. They were the foot soldiers of an invasion and conquest in the “new world.” They were the ones who introduced disease. They were the ones who introduced alcoholism. They were the ones who introduced gunpowder and many, many things that led to our decimation."

"I wish I could do it again, only I wish I could take all of the animals out of the environmental fur farm ... I have absolutely no regrets, and I hope the same thing continues to happen at MSU and every other college campus that does animal research."

"Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street."

"My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racial genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in environment."

"If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification."

"I had one experience which gave me some slant on the way large organizations run. I was not allowed to take spherical trigonometry because I'd sprained my ankle. Because I'd sprained my ankle I had an incomplete in gym, phys ed. And the rule was that if you had an incomplete in anything, you were not allowed to take an overload. I argued with some clerical person in the administration office, and was stopped there. It's an experience which I've remembered since, and advised people not to be stopped at the first point."

"I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation to do my climb by moonlight and unroped. This is contrary to all my rock climbing teaching & does not mean poor training, but only a strong-headedness."

"...and on MSNBC all over the world. Now, uhh, because it's available all over the world, doesn't mean, by the way, that anybody's watchin' it. Am I right Charles?""

"People of color have had to unlearn the assumption that racism is individual, that it is primarily a question of individual attitudes that can be dealt with through sensitivity training. You remember that Don Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hoes" about five years ago? Five years later he's rehabilitated! But of course this doesn't compensate for the fact that Troy Davis is dead, his life claimed by the most racist of all of our institutions, capital punishment. No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism."

"I would rather go to Baghdad than go to a professional basketball game."

"This is the Imus in the Morning program, We're not happy 'till you're not happy."

"Well, June is, uh, National Dairy Month, and I'll be milking Deirdre later... Ain't that right baby."

"Charles: This is the Imus in the Morning radio program. Imus: I'm hearin' you baby. Charles: Yeah! Imus: Where we at? Charles: On WFAN New York. Imus: Hear that. Charles: You know what I'm sayin'? Imus Yeah. Charles: Seven o'clock Eastern Time, and time ImusWhy are we talking like fourteen year old black children? Charles Because we're racist? Imus: Yes. Yeah. Charles: Because we're stupid? Imus: Beyond stupid. Senile and stupid. And lame Charles: Oh, please. Good lord."

"I'm Howard Stern with a vocabulary. I'm the man he wishes he could be. Yes, Howard Stern is a slut. He's a bastard, too. Worse--a Jew bastard! That's the worst kind. Put him in the oven."

"We have an autocracy which — which runs this university. It's managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?" That's the answer.Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be — have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean — Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!"

"It's 9:15 on 12/13 and another black king will be taken from the scene."

"What is certain is that since 1992, “Tookie” has been a voice reaching out to the voiceless. He has encouraged youth to lift themselves up so as not to end up locked up. His voice has reached impoverished and alienated youth in places police dare not tread. Through his personal transformation in prison, he has brought light to dark places because he knows where to look. He speaks truth to power with a sincere knowledge of what lies ahead for these youth and gives them a stark look at what their future could be if they don’t renounce gang life and all that it stands for. And they listen, because he was one of them."

"And for anyone to think that murder can be resolved by murdering, it's ridiculous. I mean, we look at all of the wars that we have throughout other countries and other nations, and all it does is – this violence, all it does is engender violence. There seems to be no end, but a continuous cycle, an incessant process of blood and gore that doesn't end. And through violence, you can't possibly obtain peace. You can, in a sense, occupy a belief of peace; in other words, through this mechanism of violence, you – it appears that because there is a standing army or standing police that is used in brutality or violence or a system that uses brutality or violence that that is going to totally eliminate or stop criminous behavior or criminous minds or killings or what have you, but it doesn't."

"The death penalty, it's not a system of justice, it is a system of – a so-called system of justice that perpetuates a, shall I say, a vindictive type of response, a vigilante type of aura upon it. We’re talking about something that is barbaric. We’re talking about something that – it doesn't deter anything. I mean, if it did, then it wouldn't be so many – especially in California, we're talking about over 650 individuals on death row. And if it was a deterrent, this place wouldn't be filled like this. And it's an expensive ordeal that – the money, as you know, the monetary means comes out of the taxpayers' pocket."

"Well, the fact that a person such as me, of my ilk, who deemed the opposing gang as an eternal enemy, it wasn't hard for people to believe me, because they knew where I stood. There were no clandestine or latent messages. Everybody knew where I stood. And for me to come out and say that what we were doing was wrong, it was believable. That's why people didn't – or at least the gang members didn't discredit my propensity and my alacrity for peace. That's why I was embraced with sincerity by those who I knew and those I didn't know on both sides of the fence."

"And when you maintain this sense of peace and you live by truth, by integrity, these things don't bother me. It doesn't. I have been experiencing moribund type experiences most of my life. I could have died many a times. I could have died when I was shot. I could have died when I was shot at by the police and rival gang members. There were many opportunities for me to die. Of course, I don't want to die. I mean, after my redemption I have what I consider to be a joie de vivre, so, you know, I have an enjoyment, a love for life. So that’s why I can calmly sit here and speak to you or anyone else with peace in my heart and peace in my mind. I don't get rattled. Nothing can rattle me. Nothing will ever rattle me. I have been rattled the majority of my life."

"We started out — at least my intent was to, in a sense — address all of the so-called neighboring gangs in the area and to put, in a sense — I thought I can cleanse the neighborhood of all these, you know, marauding gangs. But I was totally wrong. And eventually, we morphed into the monster we were addressing."

"I’m talking to any youth who are considered to be or deemed to be at-risk or even hinting around being a thug or a criminal of any type of genre. I mostly propagate education and the need for it, because to me, that is the terra firma in which any human being must stand in order to survive in this country or to survive anywhere in the world, in dealing, you know, with every aspect of civilization, every aspect of surviving. Education is very important. It took me all of these years to discern that, and now I do."

"Between the years of 1988 to 1994, and it's a continuous — it's an incessant reality for me. My redemptive transition began in solitary confinement, and unlike other people who express their experiences of an epiphany or a satori, I never experienced anything of that ilk. Mine — that wouldn't have been enough. I often tell people that I didn't have a 360-degree turnaround; I had a 720-degree turnaround. It took me twice as much. Just one spin around wouldn't have done it. I was that messed up, that lost, that mentacided, brainwashed. So, I was able to gradually in a piecemeal fashion change my life slowly but surely through education, through edification, through spiritual cultivation, battling my demons. And eventually, that led to me embracing redemption."

"Once I was in solitary confinement, it provided me with the isolated moments to reflect on my past and to dwell upon something greater, something better than involving myself in thuggery and criminality. It had to be more to life than that. It had to be more than the madness that was disseminating throughout this entire prison."