Social Activists

"No straight lines make up my life; And all my roads have bends; There's no clear-cut beginnings; And so far no dead-ends."

"All my life's a circle; But I can't tell you why; Season's spinning round again; The years keep rollin' by."

"All my life's a circle; Sunrise and sundown; Moon rolls thru the nighttime; Till the daybreak comes around."

"The moonlight shown upon her as she lay back in my bed. It was the kind of scene I only had imagined in my head. I just could not believe it, to think that she was real. And as I tried to tell her she said "Shhh.. I know just how you feel. And if you want to come here with me, then that's all right with me. 'Cause I've been oh so lonely, lovin' someone is a better way to be. anywhere's a better way to be.""

"And it shamed me into silence, as quietly she said, "If you want me to come with you, then that's all right with me. Cause I know I'm going nowhere, and anywhere's a better place to be. Anywhere's a better place to be.""

"I am the midnight watchman down at Miller's Tool and Die. And I watch the metal rusting, and I watch the time go by. A week ago at the diner I stopped to get a bite. And this here lovely lady she sat two seats from my right. And Lord, Lord, Lord she was alright. Oh she was so damned beautiful that she'd warm a winter's frost. But she was long past lonely, and well nigh unto lost. Now I'm not much of a mover, or a pick-em-up easy guy, But I decided to glide on over, and give her one good try. And Lord, Lord, Lord she was worth a try."

"And the broad who served the whisky She was a big old friendly girl. And she tried to fight her empty nights By smilin' at the world."

"He looks at the city where no one had known him. He looks at the sky where no one looks down. He looks at his life and what it has shown him. He looks for his shadow it cannot be found."

"You see, she was gonna be an actress And I was gonna learn to fly. She took off to find the footlights, And I took off for the sky. And here, she's acting happy, Inside her handsome home. And me, I'm flying in my taxi, Taking tips, and getting stoned, I go flying so high, when I'm stoned."

"And she walked away in silence, It's strange, how you never know, But we'd both gotten what we'd asked for, Such a long, long time ago."

"There was not much more for us to talk about, Whatever we had once was gone. So I turned my cab into the driveway, Past the gate and the fine trimmed lawns. And she said we must get together, But I knew it'd never be arranged. And she handed me twenty dollars, For a two fifty fare, she said "Harry, keep the change." Well another man might have been angry, And another man might have been hurt, But another man never would have let her go... I stashed the bill in my shirt."

"It took a while, but she looked in the mirror, And she glanced at the license for my name. A smile seemed to come to her slowly, It was a sad smile, just the same. And she said, "How are you Harry?" I said, "How are you Sue? Through the too many miles and the too little smiles I still remember you.""

"This commitment to end world hunger, and my music and story songs, are ways of dealing with the world as I see it. I'm playing 200 concerts per year-- half of them benefits-- all of them attempts at getting across the footlights to people I would enjoy spending time with in non-concert situations. And over the past 4 years of musical fun, millions of dollars have been raised for things I believe in. Telling stories of our time, building a lasting body of work, new songs, new records, new audiences, new challenges, and still that painfully exciting process of growth that can make one's life into a richly woven tapestry."

"The major thing I'm afraid of is being 65 and saying, 'Gee, I wish I had done this and that, and that.' I want to face old age knowing I've tried all I wanted to try."

"I never really drove a cab, but I do have a hack license in case of emergencies – like no money."

"I spent a week there one afternoon."

"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag."

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses."

"On November 17, 1915, it was planned to attack Fort Riviere, Haiti, with a force made up of detachments from the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Twenty-third Companies, and the marine detachment and sailors from the Connecticut. Fort Riviere was on old French bastion fort, about 200 feet on the side, with thick walls of brick and stone, the walls being loopholed. The original entrance had been in the northern side but had been blocked, a small breech in the southern wall being used in its stead. As this breach in the wall was the only entrance to the fort it was naturally covered by the defenders on the inside making passage through it into the fort a most hazardous undertaking for the leading men. Notwithstanding the fact that the fire of the Cacos was constantly passing through this hole in the wall, Sergt. Ross L. Iams, Fifth Company, unhesitatingly jumped through, closely followed by Pvt. Samuel Gross of the Twenty-third Company. A melee then ensued inside of the fort for about 10 minutes, the Cacos fighting desperately with rifles, clubs, stonce, etc., during which several jumped from the walls in an effort to escape, but were shot by the automatic guns of the Fifth Company and by the Thirteenth Company advancing to the attack. Gunnery Sergt. Daniel Daly, Fifteenth Company, during the operations was the most conspicuous figure among the enlisted personnel. Sergt. Ross L. Iams, Fifth Company, is recommended for a medal of honor for coolness and bravery in entering Fort Riviere at the head of the attacking force, when such action on his part seemed almost certain to result in his being killed or wounded. Pvt. Samuel Gross, Twenty-third Company, to receive a medal of honor for his coolness and bravery in entering Fort Riviere immediately behind Sergt. Iams, when such action on his part seemed almost certain to result in his being killed or wounded. It is urged that Maj. Smedley D. Butler be given a medal of honor for his conspicuous bravery during the assault on Fort Riviere. Two men entered ahead of him, doing so to prevent him from being the first. Theirs was devotion to him, while his action was devotion to duty. The assault inside the fort was made by 23 men with the knowledge that no quarter would be given them."

"As commanding officer of detachments from the 5th, 13th, 23d Companies and the marine and sailor detachment from the U.S.S. Connecticut, Maj. Butler led the attack on Fort Riviere, Haiti, 17 November 1915. Following a concentrated drive, several different detachments of marines gradually closed in on the old French bastion fort in an effort to cut off all avenues of retreat for the Caco bandits. Reaching the fort on the southern side where there was a small opening in the wall, Maj. Butler gave the signal to attack and marines from the 15th Company poured through the breach, engaged the Cacos in hand-to-hand combat, took the bastion and crushed the Caco resistance. Throughout this perilous action, Maj. Butler was conspicuous for his bravery and forceful leadership."

"The President of the United States of America, in the name of Congress, takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor (First Award) to Major Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps, for distinguished conduct in battle, in the engagement of Vera Cruz, Mexico, on 22 April 1914. Major Butler was eminent and conspicuous in command of his battalion. He exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22d and in the final occupation of the city."

"The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments."

"A few profit – and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war."

"Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket -- and are safely pocketed."

"But what does it profit the masses? What does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit the men who are maimed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children? What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits? Yes, and what does it profit the nation?"

"There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making. Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?"

"How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried the bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?"

"I spent 33 years and 4 months In active service as a member of our country's most agile military force – the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. … Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. … I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. … During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents."

"My interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of Fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home."

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."

"Accustomed as we are by hereditary prejudices an absolutely unsound education and training to see Government, legislation and magistracy everywhere around, we have come to believe that man would tear his fellow man to pieces like a wild beast the day the police took his eye off him; that chaos would come about if authority were overthrown during a revolution. And with out eyes shut we pass by thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely, without any intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under government tutelage."

"Kropotkin’s anarchist communism is endorsed by a vast majority of anarchists, but not by all. There are individualist anarchists, some of whom are proponents of private property, while others have little concern at all for future social organization, concentrating their attention on the inner freedom of an individual in any social order; there are also Proudhonist anarchists. But the fact that anarchist communism is accepted by all those involved in the social struggle of our time, chiefly in the workers’ movement, is not a coincidence nor a question of the temporary success of one idea or another."

"Kropotkin’s communism stems from two sources: on the one hand, from the study of economic phenomena and their historical development, and, on the other, from the social ideal of equality and freedom. His objective scientific research and his passionate search for a social formation into which maximum justice can be embodied consistently led him to the same solution: anarchist communism."

"It was the development of the theory of anarchist communism that Kropotkin believed to be his main contribution to the theory of anarchism. Indeed, what had the economic ideal of the anarchist movement been before Kropotkin published a series of his famous articles in the Le Révolté newspaper in 1879, articles which eventually made up his book Words of a Rebel?"

"… the purest and most upright apostle of individualism … the righteous man (tsadik) of the new world … a pure and crystalline soul."

"The desire to link theory with practice is evident in almost all Kropotkin's contributions to Le Révolté. He is considering the revolution, not in the apocalyptic form of a vast inferno of destruction which so often haunted Bakunin, but as a concrete event in which the rebellious workers must be aware of the consequences of their actions, so that revolt will not end in the establishment of new organs of power that will halt the natural development of a free society. … Revolution cannot be made with words alone; a knowledge of the necessary action and a will toward it must also exist."

"To those who knew Kropotkin, the man seemed more important than his works, and throughout our account we have had to record the strong impressions of amiability and goodness left by him. He had many ideological enemies, but few men of celebrity in their own time have had so few personal foes; even those bitterly opposed to his teachings usually found his modesty and sincerity difficult to resist. … His ideal of human solidarity was no vague conception, nor his amiability a superficial virtue. They were continually manifested in his daily life, and, although he may at times have fallen into error, there is nothing in Kropotkin's acts or writings of intellectual dishonesty. He always spoke what he thought to be right, and was ready to take the consequences, whether it meant imprisonment or — what was much worse to a man of his character — the loss of old and respected friends. He was always kind, anxious to avoid giving pain or inconvenience, and conscious of the needs of others. His hospitality was wide, his sympathy abundant, his generosity as unlimited as his resources allowed."

"A lot of anarchists had a major role in influencing my political thinking, especially the individualist anarchists. … I find a lot of Kropotkin compatible even though he was a communist anarchist. Nothing wrong with communist anarchism as long as it remains voluntary. Any one that wants to go make a commune, go ahead, do it. I got nothing against it. As long as there's room to the individualist to do his or her own thing."

"Two of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante; the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia."

"He (Jack London) wrote an essay called "What Life Means to Me" which takes its place with Kropotkin's "Appeal to the Young" and Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," and its closing sentence rings with his faith in the rise of the common man. "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.""

"A scientist, humanitarian and of royal birth, Kropotkin is a genius of the age; not only does his colossal intellect cause him to stand in bold relief, but his personality is one of indescribable and unduplicated power."

"I once asked Prince Kropotkin, the Russian nihilist, how he endured his long years in prison, deprived of books, pen, ink, and paper. “Ah,” he said, “I thought out many questions on which I had a deep interest. In the pursuit of an idea I took no note of time. When tired of solving knotty problems I recited all the beautiful passages in prose or verse I had ever learned. I became acquainted with my self and my own resources. I had a world of my own, a vast empire, that no Russian jailor or Czar could invade.” Such is the value of liberal thought and broad culture when shut from all human companionship, bringing comfort and sunshine within even the four walls of a prison cell. As women ofttimes share a similar fate, should they not have all the consolation that the most liberal education can give?"

"the very existence of the commons implies the reality of cooperative management and ownership. It is important to recognize that competition has not always been a driving force in human societies. The scientist and philosopher Peter Kropotkin writes: "If we... ask Nature: "who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization.""

"He was probably one of the noblest souls that ever lived. He writes in his book that he'd been away in the Urals-he was a geographer-and he was discovering that the mountains really ran in a different direction than everybody had thought. When he came back, he said, "There seems to be nothing left of our movements. The only movement that seems to have any power at all is the Women's Movement. And I think maybe the reason for this is that these young women are going about teaching the serfs to read." (These are inexact quotes.) He said that it might be because they were thinking not only of themselves, but also of how to share the earth with others. It was very thrilling to me to think about; it brings us back to the seventies and what was happening then.-Was everything falling apart? No, no. There was the Women's Movement growing."

"The chief inspiration of the anarchist communism of the 1880s and 1890s, Peter Kropotkin, encouraged women's activism within the movement but disapproved of feminism. He saw the struggle of the working class for liberation as primary; women's specific interests were to be subordinated to the achievement of this goal."

"Inspired by Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, Mollie Steimer joined the anarchist group Freedom in 1917...Steimer's conversion to anarchism derived less from an emotional response to a crisis situation than from her acceptance of the basic tenets of anarchist ideology. As a disciple of Kropotkin, Steimer possessed an intellectual and moral vision of the future."

"Kropotkin, while expecting women to engage in active political work, expressed impatience with those women who put feminism ahead of their devotion to the (male) working class. His own family relationships were almost stereotypically conventional. Proudhon, Kropotkin, and the other anarchist theorists who viewed women in such conventional ways argued that certain behavior patterns were natural for each sex. Since nature provided woman with a dependent personality, a nurturing instinct, and a desire for motherhood, to have her act in accord with those feelings would not violate her freedom because they would be an expression of her natural self. Many anarchist women, from Emma Goldman to the unassuming Helena Born, disagreed with this notion of woman's nature."

"I have no special competence to be able to pass judgment on Kropotkin as a scientist. I know that in his younger days he had rendered remarkable services to geography and to geology; I appreciate the great value of his book Mutual Aid ... It seems, however, to me that he lacked something to make him a real man of science; the capacity to forget his desires and preconceptions in order to observe the facts with an impassive objectivity. He seemed to me to be rather what I should call a poet of science. He might have been able to arrive at new truths by intuitive genius, but others would have had to verify these truths; men with less genius or no genius at all, but better gifted with what is called the scientific spirit. Kropotkin was too passionate to be an exact observer."

"I read Goodman and Kropotkin and Emma and the rest, and finally found a politics I liked. But then I had to integrate these political ideas, which I'd formulated over a good year's reading, into a novel, a utopia. The whole process took quite a while, as you might imagine, and there were hundreds of little details that never found their way into the novel."

"Odonanism is roughly identifiable with anarchism. I think it is a fairly identifiable form of the anarchist lineage of Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and, to a large extent, Paul Goodman. It's pacifist anarchism, an identifiable tradition, not Bakhunism. It's just that nobody else had ever used it for fiction-it seemed such a pity."