Abbie Hoffman quotes - page 2

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. (Abbie Hoffman)
Never impose your language on people you wish to reach. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
The key to organizing an alternative society is to organize people around what they can do, and more importantly, what they want to do. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
Once you get the right image the details aren't that important. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
LONG LIVE THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION! View quote
Abbie Hoffman
THE KEY TO ORGANIZING AN ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY IS TO ORGANIZE PEOPLE AROUND WHAT THEY CAN DO AND MORE IMPORTANTLY WHAT THEY WANT TO DO. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
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. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
I only regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
You ask, "What about the innocent bystanders?" But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent. (Abbie Hoffman)
If this guy is God, then this is the God that the United States of America deserves. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
In Woodstock Nation there are no writers-only poet-warriors. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
I see Judaism as a way of life. Sticking up for the underdog. Being an outsider. A critic of society. The kid on the corner who says the emperor has no clothes on. The Prophet. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
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. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
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. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
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. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
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. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
For six years, the only consistent thing about our national drug policy has been its inconsistency. Harsher penalties, urine testing, hysteria, budget cuts and the simplistic "Just Say No!' campaign (the equivalent of telling manic depressives to "just cheer up") have returned drug education and treatment to the Reefer Madness era. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
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. (Abbie Hoffman)
It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
The idea that media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that's about tenth or eleventh on their list. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
My critique of democracy begins and ends with this point. Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce. View quote
Abbie Hoffman