Critics Of Religion

"Man treats woman as his own property and not as being capable of feelings, like himself. The way man treats women is much worse than the way landlords treat servants and the high-caste treat the low-caste. These treat them so demeaningly only in situations mutually affecting them; but men treat cruelly and as slaves, from their birth till death."

"“For more than 40 years, I have been describing Tamil as a barbarous language (Kattumirandi Mozhi) used only by barbarians. When Brahmins and the Brahmin-dominated government wanted to make Hindi a State language, I started, to a very limited extent, advocating the promotion of Tamil language only to oppose the imposition of Hindi language."

"On occasion, DK Leader E.V. Ramaswami Naicker has called for Brahmin killings and burning of agraharams (Brahmin quarters of cities and towns) . . . These various elements of Dravidian movement's populism have been linked together and given overall coherence by the conspiratorial and demonological theme of anti-Brahminism. . . . The movement also expresses itself in direct action. In recent years EVR and DK have carried on campaigns to erase Hindi lettering from railroad signs, to burn effigies of Rama and smash 'idols' of Hindu deities, to burn the Indian flag, or remove or erase the term Brahmin displayed at 'Hotels' (cafes or restaurants) to burn the Indian Constitution and destroy statues of Gandhi and to burn the maps of India."

"His main thesis was that Brahmins had debased Dravidian culture, which in turn had demoralized non-Brahmin youth; and that in order to salvage Dravidian culture from its impure state, Brahminical priesthood and Sanskritic scriptural tradition must be destroyed and Brahminical religious practitioners expelled from Dravidian-Tamil society."

"Let him be put in a lunatic asylum and his perverted mind treated there."

"Old and senile man like Periyar deserve a place in lunatic asylum rather than in public life."

"While Jaffrelot resorts to convoluted ways to invent racism in the Hindu polity, he develops a blind eye to the racism prevalent in the forging of Dravidian identity. He eulogizes E.V. Ramasami as an ‘egalitarian in a western individualist vein’. Jaffrelot completely glosses over the fact that Kudi Arasu , the official journal of Ramasami's movement, praises Hitler explicitly and draws parallels between Jews and Brahmins. Kudi Arasu quotes at length Hitler's reasons for despising Jews, as found in Mein Kampf and how he vowed to purge alleged Jewish dominance in the German society. It admiringly describes how Hitler accomplished his avowed promise of ending Jewish dominance in Germany, and it warns that the Brahmins of South India pose the same danger as the Jews of pre-Nazi Germany. He praises the racist Afro-Dravidianism of Periyar as ‘an explicitly ethnic conception of the low castes’ identity'. He compares their situation to that of the blacks in South Africa."

"The enormous privileges given to Brahmins by the Vedas were sacrosanct only as long as they went unchallenged. The challenge rose in the Tamil country like a whirlwind spearheaded by an iconoclast who questioned the Vedas and the gods as well. He took apparently extremist positions on some issues, but the fundamental nature of the social revolution he wrought was clear even to its victims. The political perspectives of Tamil Nadu and with it much of India, were altered with as seeming finality by Ramaswamy Naicker."

"When the first wife of EVR Nagammai wanted to go to temple, EVR could not win over her by his arguments. So he secretly went to some of his ‘minor’ friends and showed them his first wife and told them that she was a new Dasi in the town asking them to make her consent to their desires. Consequently they started teasing and stalking her from the temple. Traumatised by this his wife stopped attending the temple. Later she came to know that this was a trick played by her rationalist husband."

"I strongly condemn the statement of a BJP leader and a Member of Parliament that the BJP has come here to eradicate ‘Periyarism’ (Periyar policy) in Tamil Nadu. Father Periyar was the one who fought and won against the poisonous policy of ‘Sanatana Dharma’."

"An earlier anti-Brahmin activist, Ramaswamy Naicker, had said that "we will do with the Brahmins what Hitler did with the Jews". Another slogan of his was: "If you see a snake and a Brahmin, kill the Brahmin first"."

"To destroy caste discrimination burn the pictures of Nehru and Gandhi and also the Constitution of India. If all these methods fail to give us results, then we should start beating and killing the Brahmins; we should start burning their houses."

"Periyar clarifies, “There is nothing to feel surprised or hesitant about breaking Pillayar idol. Please let me know if there were a better means of expressing our feelings, you sudra ministers, sudra members of parliament and the legislature, educators including vice chancellors, reputed millionaires, scholars, lords, former zamindars, former maharajas, Sri La Sri Heads of mutts! I am prepared to give a patient hearing to you.”"

"“There is so much in common with the original Dravidian religion and Islam. The Arab word for Dravidian religion is Islam. When the Aryan faith was sought to be forced on our people, the Prophet Muhammed revived our people”s original faith by means of Islam“."

"“Tomorrow if Russia invades India, I would rather support Russia and get shot or jailed than to support India on patriotic grounds, not even a minute.”"

"Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."

"People close to Zappa told me there was a good chance he could be diagnosed as manic-depressive if "they" ever got a chance to look at him. There was no way I could know if he'd have the patience to give me one minute or one hour. Expect anything, they said. Radical mood swing is the core of Zappa’s personality — and no doubt the core of his creativity as well. When I knocked on Frank’s door, he opened it with the slightest possible shred of acknowledgment. No handshake. I knew immediately where his mood swing was at the moment – several fathoms below sea level. That long black cloud was down and was there to stay for the duration of our first interview. His disdain for the ‘interrogation,’ as he called it, remained obvious. On our next encounter, the cloud disappeared and Zappa lightened up, rapping casually with fans who wandered in, and generally enjoying himself. Surprisingly, the results of both sessions were somehow consistent: Laced in with Zappa’s unrelenting cynicism, the hilarity was always there — regardless of what mood he was in. The only difference seemed to be whether or not he was laughing."

"The Shaggs: better than The Beatles"

"In the fight between you and the world, back the world."

"Politics is the entertainment division of the Military Industrial Complex."

"The '60s was really stupid … It was a type of merchandising, Americans had this hideous weakness, they had this desire to be OK, fun guys and gals, and they haven't come to terms with the reality of the situation: we were not created equal. Some people can do carpentry, some people can do mathematics, some people are brain surgeons and some people are winos and that's the way it is, and we're not all the same. This concept of one world-ism, everything blended and smoothed out to this mediocre norm that everybody downgrades themselves to be is stupid. The '60s was merchandised to the public at large... My pet theory about the '60s is that there is a sinister plot behind it... The lessons learnt in the '60s about merchandising stupidity to the American public on a large scale have been used over and over again since that time."

"Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see which has people in it who believe a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence."

"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."

"The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced."

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another."

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it."

"There is no hell. There is only France."

"The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like."

"A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole."

"The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consistent and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only "good guys" in it, or eating cottage cheese."

"Gail has said in interviews that one of the things that makes our relationship work is the fact that we hardly ever get to talk to each other."

"My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can. Children are naive — they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble."

"We're not talking light-hearted foolishness here — when we go for stupid we go for BIG STUPID — like people who shoot at you on the freeway, or the Rambos and Rambo-ettes who blow people away in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants with automatic weapons."

"Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe."

"If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT."

"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."

"A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians."

"The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon."

"For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973."

"I've smoked ten marijuana cigarettes in my life, and probably the last time I had one near my face was twelve, fifteen years ago. And the reason I did was because, since I do smoke, people would say, "Here, smoke this, you'll get high." So I smoked it, and it gave me a sore throat and made me sleepy. And I must either presume that that's what high means, or something was wrong. But I've never had a positive result from smoking marijuana. It just wasn't my cup of tea. And I never used LSD, never used cocaine, never used heroin or any of that other stuff."

"The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe … I really think that. … When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun..."

"Why should I smile when I'm sitting here with you?"

"Tell you what — Kiss my ass! How do you like that…?"

"Do you think you are protecting somebody by taking away seven words?"

"I'm a conservative, and you might not like that, but I am, and the fact of the matter is, this bill that they're talking about in Maryland is stupid."

"I think that if you use the so-called "strong words" you'll get your point across faster and you can save a lot of beating around the bush. Why are people afraid of words? Sometimes the dumbest thing that gets said makes the point for you."

"On Ventura, there she goes She just bought some bitch'n clothes Tosses her head n flips her hair She got a whole bunch of nothin in there"

"Shes a valley girl In a clothing store Okay, fine... Fer sure, fer sure."

"You say your life's a bum deal 'n yer up against the wall. Well, people, you ain't even got no deal at all. 'Cause what they do in Washington. They just takes care of Number One. An' Number One ain't you. You ain't even Number Two!"

"There are three things that smell of fish. One of them is fish. The other two are growing on you!"