Abbie Hoffman (1936 – 1989)
Social and political activist in the United States, co-founder of the Youth International Party, and later, a fugitive from the law, who lived under an alias following a conviction for dealing cocaine.
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.
The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution.
In this state, dig it, you get twenty years for sale of dope to a minor. You only get five to ten for manslaughter. So like, the thing is, if you're selling to a kid and cops come, shoot the kid real quick!
A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station, not the factory. It concentrates its energy on infiltrating and changing the image system.
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.
Free speech is the right to shout "Theater!" in a crowded fire.
The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain't going.
Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.
All you kiddies remember to lay off the needle drugs, the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.
If this guy is God, then this is the God that the United States of America deserves.
I only regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.
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.
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.
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.
In the nineteen-sixties, apartheid was driven out of America. Legal segregation — Jim Crow — ended. We didn't end racism, but we ended legal segregation. We ended the idea that you can send a million soldiers ten thousand miles away to fight in a war that people do not support. We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens. Now, it doesn't matter who sits in the Oval Office. But the big battles that were won in that period of civil war and strife you cannot reverse. We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong ... and we were right! I regret nothing!
I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.
You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.
I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.
It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail.
Nostalgia is a form of depression both for a society and an individual.