"Any deviation from that standard is conceived as a wound or a sickness. So the present atmosphere in America seems to them to be like the famous torture described by Orwell of tying the victims hands and enclosing his head in a cage. And then a hungry rat is put into the cage. I hasten to testify that the American atmosphere isn't really all that terrifying. I'm only saying that we have in our midst some people like Hunter Thompson, who are super sensitive, practically everybody feels fine, just fine. As for those who wish to know more about Hunter and his ideals, his frazzled nervous system, his self-destructiveness and all that, he is un-abridgeable. He is that rare sort of American author that must be read. He makes exciting, moving collages of carefully selected junk. He must be experienced. They can't be paraphrased. As for the truth about his health, I have asked around about it, I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane. But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Grey fasod. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians. The disease is fatal. There is no cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be led as easily to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from the Hunter Thompson disease. I don't have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don't have Hunter Thompson Disease." -Vonnegut

Leonard Peltier Quotes

My life is a prayer for my people.

My body may be locked in here, but my spirit flies with the eagle.

We're not supposed to be perfect, were supposed to be useful.

My life is an extended agony. I feel like I've lived a hundred lifetimes in prison already, and maybe I have. But I'm prepared to live thousands more on behalf of my people.

If my imprisonment does nothing more than educate an unknowing and uncaring public about the terrible conditions Native Americans and all indigenous people around the world continue to endure, then my suffering has had, and continues to have, a purpose. My peoples struggle to survive inspires my own struggle to survive. Each of us must be a survivor.

We need each other. Each of us is responsible for what happens on this Earth. We are each absolutely essential, each totally irreplaceable. Each of us is the swing vote in a bitter election battle being waged between our best and our worst possibilities. How are you going to cast your all-important ballot? Humanity awaits your decision.

But those who, for a few pieces of U.S. silver, or for whatever misguided motives, inflicted this evil on me, and this poor woman and on all of us, including the American people themselves, I often wonder what fitful dreams come to them at night if they truly believe in their Christian god and the eternally sizzling hell that surely waits for them. But no, there I go, being vindictive and vengeful myself, wishing harm on others as they have wished it on me. I have to watch that in myself. I have to step on the head of that snake every time it rises. There is always someone to hate. The list of those who have earned our hatred, and spurned our hatred is endless. Shall we draw up lists of each other's crimes? Must we hate each other for all time.

"Only one thing's sadder than remembering you were once free, and that's forgetting you once were free. That would be the saddest thing of all."
-Matthew King, Lakota Spiritual Elder

The Message by Leonard Peltier

Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity.
But silence is impossible. Silence screams.
But silence is a message, just as doing nothing is an act.
Let who you are ring out and resonate in every word and deed.
Yes, become who you are.
There is no sidestepping your own being, your own responsibility.
What you do is who you are, you are your own cummupance.
You become your own message.
You are the message.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

'They wait, patiently. Their eye's dreamy and docile, like a cow. Eyes that seem to say "Lines, we know lines. Ah, me." And they do ya' know.' -Henry Rollins

"As long as grass grows or water runs.... An Indian GI, veteran of Vietnam, testifying publicly in 1979 not only about the war but about his own maltreatment as an Indian, repeated that phrase and began to weep"
-from A people history of The United States by Howard Zinn

"I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by our ears like the wind through the trees in the winter. My warriors fell around me, the sun rose dim on us in the morning and at night it sunk in, a dark cloud and looked like a ball of fire. That is the last sun that shone on Black Hawk. He is now a prisoner to the white man. He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and the papooses against white men who came year after year to cheat them and take away their lands. You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indian are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do not steal. An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our nation. He would be put to death, and eaten up by the wolves. The white men are bad schoolmasters. They carry false books and deal in false actions. They smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him. They shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, and to deceive them, and ruin our wives. We told them to leave us alone, and keep away from us. They followed on, and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe, we lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterous lazy drones. We were becoming all talkers and no workers. The white men do not scalp the head, but they do far worse. They poison the heart. Farewell my nation, Farewell to Blackhawk!" -Blackhawks surrender speech, 1832

"The Indian was peculiarly susceptible to every sensory attribute of every natural feature of his surroundings. He lived in the open. He knew every marsh, glade, hilltop, rock, spring creek as only the hunter can know them. He had never fully grasped the concept of private ownership of land as any more rational than private ownership of air, but he loved the land with a deeper emotion than could any proprietor. He felt as much a part of it as the rocks and the trees, the animals and the birds. His homeland was holy ground, sanctified for him as the resting place of the bones of his ancestors, and the natural shrine of his religion. He conceived it's waterfalls and ridges, it's clouds and mist, it's glens and meadows, to be inhabited by the myriad of spirits with whom he held daily communion. It was from this rain washed land of forests, streams and lakes, to which he was held by the traditions of his forebears, and his own spiritual aspirations that he was to be driven from to the arid treeless plains of the far west, a desolate region then universally known as the great American Desert." -John Avery, in his book The Disinherited

"Workmen of all lands unite! You have nothing to lose but you chains, you have a world to win!" -The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees" -Zapata

"Every day I beat my own previous record for the number of consecutive days I've stayed alive." -George Carlin

"We have crowded the tribes upon a few miserable acres on our Southern frontier. It is all that is left to them of their once boundless forest, and still, like the horse leach, our insatiate cupidity cries, "Give, give!" Sir, do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?" -Senator Theadore Frelinghisen of New Jersey 1829

"See the cat? See the cradle? No damn cat. No damn cradle." -Kurt Vonnegut Cat's Cradle

"Is it not murder when, compelled by want, people are forced to fester in squalid, germ filled tenements, where the sunlight never enters and disease finds a prolific breeding place? Untold thousand went to their death in these unspeakable places, yet, so far as the law was concerned, the rents collected by the Astors, as well as by other landlords, were honestly made. The whole institution of law saw nothing out of the way in these conditions, and very significantly so, because to repeat over and over again, law did not represent the ethics or ideals of advanced humanity. It exactly reflected, as a pool reflects the sky, the demands and self-interest of the growing propertied classes." - Gustavus Meyers, History of the Great American Fortunes

"There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viscously overcrowded version of Phoenix- a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing.... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get.... Maybe there is no heaven. Or maybe this is pure gibberish- a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found out a way to live out there where the real winds blow- to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested....
Res ipsa loquitar. Let the good times roll." -Hunter S. Thompson, Paradise Valley

"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -George Orwell

"The citizens job is to be rude--to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt" -John Ralston Saul

"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think."-Adolf Hitler

"Ideas are far more dangerous than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?" -Joseph Stalin

"If you're not turned on to politics, then politics will turn on you." -Ralph Nader

"I stand not by my country, but by the people of the whole fucking world. No fences, no borders. Free movement for all. Fuck the border. It's about time to treat people with respect. It's our culture and consumption that make her life unbearable. Fuck this country; its angry eyes, its knee-jerk hordes. Legal or illegal, watch her fucking go." -Propaghandi

"Some people have to stay and fight for survival in the country they live in while others have to leave to survive. Corporations cross international borders all the time in search of people to exploit for profit and no one stops them. They call it globalization. On the other hand, the victims of corporate domination are that they can't cross the borders in search of better lives, and are forced to stay and deal with the social, economic, and environmental messes the companies leave behind when they inevitably move their operations to places with even more "favorable business climates" (re: lower wages, lax environmental laws, tax breaks). Looks like capitalism and human rights don't mix. Much of what I know is from recent immigrants to Canada." -Propagandhi

"every tool is a weapon if you hold it right" -Ani Difranco

"the nail that sticks up gets hammered down and the masters finest tools are found slack jawed and placid amongst the cacophony of screaming billboards and disney-fied history....But undercover of the customary gap we find between history and truth, the Founding Fathers bask in the rockets red glare. The bombs bursting in air. One nation. Indivisible? the people had a coffin painted black and solemnly borne in funeral procession, they buried it deep in the earth as an emblem of the dissolution and internment of their Publick Liberty. Someday, somewhere, today's empires are tomorrow's ashes." -Prpaghandi

"Don't condemn your life to be riddled with shame. Everyone's hands cause natural disasters."-Propaghandi

"I drink myself to sleep because I'm losing faith that we, here will ever amount to anything more than reluctant human subsidies, the moving parts in a death-machine, protesting their complicity, but waiting for someone else to throw their body on the churning gears. I drink myself to sleep because I'm losing faith that we here in the cradle of affluence can cease this sickening drive for individual strength through state powers' swinging fists or that we'll ever look back and laugh at the irony that is atomic murder is enshrined in Independence USA..." -Propaghandi

"...McKinley's cant at the recent Boston banquet... the Philippines reeked... of the great department store, which has reached perfect expertness in the art of killing silently, and with no public, and with no public squalling or commotion." -William James

"What matters most is how well you walk through the fire." -Charles Bukowski

"women go to men who are pigs
women go to men with dead souls
women go to men who fuck badly
women go to shadows of men
women go
go
because they must go
in the order of
things.

the women know better
but often choose out of
disorder and confusion.

they can heal with their touch.
they can kill what they touch and
I am dying
but not dead
yet." -Charles Bukowski

"I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood." -Mark Twain

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" -Henry David Thoreau

"So shoot me." -Kurt Vonnegut Sr.

"Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!" -Fats Waller

"being alive is a crock of shit." -Kilgore Trout

"For practically everybody, the end of the world can't come soon enough" -Kurt Vonnegut

" We never asked to be born in the first place" -Kurt Vonnegut

"When the shoes fill with blood
you know
that the shoes are dead

true revolution
comes from true revulsion
when things get bad enough
the kitten will kill the lion" -Charles Bukowski

"it's moments like
this- you can feel it
happening- that you grow
transformed
partly into something
else strange and
unnamable-
so when death comes
it can only take
part of
you" -Charles Bukowski

"Each night counts for something
or else we'd all
go mad." -Charles Bukowski

I hear all the latest tunes
By Charles Bukowski
somewhere in whatever neighborhood
there's
some guy
at 10:30 in the morning
sunday morning
monday morning

washing and polishing his
car
with the radio on
LOUD
so that the entire neighborhood
is compelled
to listen to the music
that he is
listening to
but it's all right
because surely we don't
want him to be bored out
there;
it's going to take him
hours.

they'd arrest a drunk or a
panhandler
as a
public nuisance
but this boy is a
respectable citizen
and it's the respectable
citizens
that our culture is built
upon
and whom
the music is written
for.

if I murdered him
no court in America would
forgive
my courage.

meanwhile
he circles his car
with the
hose plus
a bucket of
suds.

he's safe
he's fearless
look at him there
almost as handsome as that twittering
bluejay
and at least 4 women are
in love with
him and he
deserves them all
and I hope he
gets them all.

it's the only way we can
teach that
son-of-a-bitch what
suffering is.

"and don't forget:
time is meant to be wasted,
love fails
and death is useless." -Charles Bukowski

roll the dice
by Charles Bukowski

if you're going to try, go all the
way,
otherwise, don't even start.

if you're going to try, go all the
way'
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or
4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you'll do it
despite rejection and the
worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you could imagine.

if you're going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the
gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.
do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, it's
the only good fight
there is.

"…an event called 'Success' at the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver…features a dozen guest speakers including Henry Kissinger, Barbara Bush, and former British Prime Minister John Major. The event is sponsored by a group called 'Peter Lowe international, the Success Authority.'…In the hallways and corridors, where you'd normally buy hot dogs and Denver Nuggets hats, Peter Lowe's Success Yearbook is being sold for $19.95, 'American Sales Leads' on CD-ROM is available for $375, and Zig Ziglar is offering 'Secrets of closing the sale' for $120…"You are the elite of America Brian Tracy author of The Psychology of Selling, tells the crowd. Say to yourself, I like me! I like me! I like me! He is followed by Henry Kissenger, who tells some foreign policy antidotes. And then Peter Lowe's attractive wife, Tamara, leads the audience in a dance contest: the winner gets a free trip to Disneyland. Four contestants climb onstage; dozens of beach balls are tossed into the crowd, the sound system blasts the Beach Boys' 'Surfin' USA' and 18,000 people start to dance. Barbara Bush is next, arriving to 'Fanfare for the common man,' her smile projected on to two gigantic television screens. She tells a story that begins, 'We had the whole gang at Kennebunkport…'….as the loudspeakers play the theme from Chariots of Fire, Lowe wheels Christopher Reeve onstage. The crowd wildly applauds…. 'I've had to leave the physical world,' Reeve says, 'By the time I was 24, I was making millions. I was pretty pleased with myself…I was selfish and neglected my family. Since my accident, I've been realizing…that success means something quite different.' Members of the audience start to weep. 'I see people who achieve these conventional goals. None of it matters.' His word cut through all the snake oil of the last few hours…everybody in the arena, no matter how greedy or how eager for a promotion, all eighteen thousand of them, know deep in their hearts that what Reeve has just said is true-too true…. Moments after Reeve is wheeled off the stage, Jack Groppel, the next speaker, walks up to the microphone and starts his pitch, 'Tell me friends, in your lifetime, have you ever been on a diet?'" -Eric Shclosser, in Fast Food Nation

"Even at eighteen, I'd go, 'Where is the hidden rule book that says I have to be made up?' Because they'd have this chair and all this makeup. I was like, 'Can't we just take a picture?' That's why all my magazines from earlier are not made up, and they're not raw. They're in between, and what shaped me is what they called the 'alternative girl' or the 'kookie girl,' because I couldn't vamp up at the drop of a hat. "When I was younger, they'd have a rack of clothing I'd never wear. They'd have a makeup person. And I'm supposed to represent myself? It was like this weird thing. I'd always wanted to be like my male predecessors, like Brando or De Niro. You take a man, and you just document him in a picture. "What you exude, your sexuality, is just a part of yourself. So a manufactured sex appeal, which includes an open mouth and lip-gloss and bright colors, this is the American porn sex appeal which has nothing to do with sex. It's like blow-up dolls. I could do that. Very easily. It's not like I can't. It's just never been my objective." -Juliette Lewis

"One of the women asked me what I thought about Ed Meese, the new attorney general. 'He'll get you,' I said, 'You'll all be in jail before long.'" -Hunter S. Thompson

"This may be the generation that may face Armageddon." -Ronald Reagan, People Magazine

"…wept the real tears of a gut shot warrior." -HST

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." -Dr. Johnson

"In the old days it was just a matter of being caught smoking cigarettes in the band room or drinking beer at lunchtime in the parking lot -and those crimes were serious, at the time, but they were not so serious as to get you expelled from the system forever. That is the hallmark of the Reagan Administration- a Punishment Ethic that permeates the whole infrastructure of American life and eventually gets down to George Orwell's notion, in Animal Farm, that "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." -HST

"Reagan's children must be proud of him. With AIDS and acid rain, there is not much left in the way of life and love and possibilities for these shortchanged children of the 80s. In addition to a huge and terribly crippling national debt, and a shocking realization that your country has slipped into the status of a second world power, and that five American dollars will barely buy a cup of coffee in Tokyo, these poor buggers are being flogged every day of their lives with the knowledge the sex is death and rain kills fish and any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool." -HST

"It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. A fat man will feel his heart burst and call it beautiful. Who knows? If there is a Heaven and a Hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of phoenix- a clean well-lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except for the ones who know in their hearts what is missing….And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con Dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get…..Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish-a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow-to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested…." -HST (all ellipses, except the one between get and Maybe, were written by the HST)

"the meek have inherited

if I suffer at this
typewriter
think how I'd feel
among the lettuce-
pickers of Salinas?

I think of the men
I've known in
factories
with no way
to get out-
choking while living
choking while laughing
at Bob Hope or Lucille
Ball while
2 or 3 children beat
tennis balls against
the walls.

some suicides are never
recorded." -Charles Bukowski

"they disgust me / how they wait for death / with as much passion / as a traffic signal // these are the people who believe advertisements / these are the people who buy dentures on credit / these are the people who celebrate holidays / these are the people who have grandchildren / these are the people who vote / these are the people who have funerals // these are the dead / the smog / the stink in the air / the lepers. // these are almost everybody / finally. // seagulls are better / seaweed is better / dirty sand is better // if I could turn that old cannon / them / and make it work / I would. // they disgust me." -defeated, by Charles Bukowski

"…I'm sitting here drunk / and my eyes seem wet with tears // it's very quiet and I feel like I have a spear / rammed into the center of my gut. // I walk to the bathroom and puke. // mercy, I think, doesn't the human race know anything about mercy?" turnabout, by Charles Bukowski

"you have no idea, cousin, how many men / can do it / but / wont." -that's why funerals are so sad, by Charles Bukowski

"thinking, the courage it took to get out of bed each / morning / and face the same things / over and over / was / enormous." -the freeway life, by Charles Bukowski

" not much to hang on to in this early morning growling. // I am sad for the dead and I am sad for the living / but not for my 5 cats or / for my wife, my wife who will / find her place in / heaven." -supposedly famous by Charles Bukowski

"agony changes form, but it never ceases for anybody." -Charles Bukowski

"yes, it's the dream that keeps you going then and now." -Charles Bukowski

"Sometimes getting started in the big time is tantamount to trying to raise an erection in a tornado and even if you do no one has the time to notice." -Charles Bukowski

"warfare is just one of the problems that besets everyone during the life of one common day." -Charles Bukowski

"that space / there / before they get to us / ensures / that / when they do / they won't / get it all // ever." it's ours, by Charles Bukowski

"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge." -Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

"There are no rules here. We're just trying to accomplish something." -Thomas Edison

"Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens." -Jimi Hendrix

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." -Mao Tse Tung
"I've had 18 straight whiskeys. I think that's the record." -Dylan Thomas, shortly before dying

"What God hath joined together no man ever shall put asunder. God will take care of that." -George Bernard Shaw

"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come." -Carl Sandburg

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." -Benjamin Franklin

"Your ignorance cramps my conversation." -Anthony Hope

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body." -C.S. Lewis

""If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever." -George Orwell

"The time is always right to do right." -Nelson Mandela

"In a fight between you and the world, back the world." -Franz Kafka

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." -MLK jr.

"We are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anyone tell you any different!" -Kurt Vonnegut

"The gods are too fond of a joke." -Aristotle

"If I have seen farther than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton

"I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics." -Johnny Mercer

"If I find 10,000 ways something wont work, I haven't failed." -Thomas Edison

"The tree of life must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Thomas Jefferson

"Hear me my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." -Chief Joseph

"Freedom of choice is a thing of the past. We're down to six media companies, six airlines, two and a half carmakers, and one radio conglomerate. Everything you will ever need is at Wal-Mart. You can choose between two political parties that sound alike, vote alike, and are funded by the same exact wealthy donors. You can choose to wear nondescript pastels and keep your mouth shut, or you can choose to wear a Marilyn Manson T-shirt and get kicked out of school. Britney or Christina, WB or UPN, Florida or Texas-there ain't no friggin difference, folks, it's all the same, it's all the same, it's all the same." -Michael Moore

"Nader represents what they used to be but no longer are, He never changed. He never lost faith, never compromised, never gave up. That's why they hate him. He didn't change his tune, didn't move to the suburbs, didn't start structuring his life around "lets see how I can make the most money for me me ME!" He didn't conform to the new baby boom code of sell-out ethics in order to advance his power. No wonder millions of high school and college kids love him. He's the opposite of their parents, the people who "raised" them by handing them a latch key, a Ritalin and a remote for the TV in the bedroom….He stayed in the same rumpled clothes. Those who beat up on him now are like the bullies in high school who will not cease their harassment until you conform and start to look, think and smell like them."
-Michael Moore on why so many adults hate Ralph Nader

"The MPAA gave Roger & Me an R rating in response to that rabbit killing….Teachers write me and say they have to edit that part out of the film so they wont get in trouble for showing my movie to their students. But less than two minutes after the bunny lady does her deed, I included footage of a scene in which the police in Flint opened fire and shot a black man who was wearing a superman cape and holding a plastic toy gun. Not once-not ever-has anyone said to me, "I can't believe a black man being shot in your movie! How horrible! How disgusting! I couldn't sleep for weeks."….There is no outrage at showing a black man being shot on camera (least of all, from the MPAA ratings board, who saw nothing wrong with that scene) Why? Because a black man being shot is no longer shocking. Just the opposite. It's normal, natural….We now except it as standard operating procedure. No big deal, just another dead black guy! That's what blacks do-kill and die. Ho-hum. Pass the butter." -Michael Moore.

"McDonalds double bacon cheeseburgers, a weapon of mass destruction." -Ralph Nader, on what product makes him think Corvair every time he sees it

"When I die again, I thought, I must remember to face it as I did that day in the mountains, succumbing to death as if she were my beloved, smiling as I took her into my arms."
-The Brotherhood of the Grape, John Fante

"The white eyes of television sets shone through the windows across the street, cowboys racing across the screens, gunfire crackling in the San Elmo twilight. A mystically impermanent, enclaves of human existence, people clustered behind small fences and flimsy stucco walls, barricaded against the darkness, waiting. I rocked back and forth and felt grief seeping into my bones, grief for man and the pain of loneliness in the house of my mother and father, aging, waiting, marking time." -The Brotherhood of the Grape, John Fante

"And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you're a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you, which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against it's continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love."
-Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice

"Getting to know someone, entering that new world, is an ultimate, irretrievable leap into the unknown. The prospect is terrifying. The stakes are high. The emotions are overwhelming. The two people are reluctant really to strip themselves naked in front of each other, because in doing so they make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves one to the other. How often they inflict pain and torment upon each other! Better to maintain shallow, superficial affairs; that way the scars are not too deep. No blood is hacked from the soul.
But I do not believe a beautiful relationship has to end always in carnage, or that we have to be fraudulent and pretentious with one another…. I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings." -Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice

" 'Baby,' he said, 'They walking in fours and kicking in doors; dropping Reds and busting heads; drinking wine and committing crime, shooting and looting, high-siding and low-riding, setting fires and slashing tires; turning over cars and burning down bars; making Parker mad and making me glad; putting an end to that 'go slow' crap and putting sweet Watts on the map-my black ass is in Folsom but my black heart is in Watts!' Tears of joy were rolling from his eyes." -Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, describing inmates celebrating news of riots in their home neighborhood.

"If you knew him you would know why we must honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves…. However much we may have differed with him-or with each other about him and his value as a man, let his going from us now serve only to bring us together, now. Consigning these mortal remains to the earth, the common mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the round is no more now a man-but a seed-which, after the winter of our discontent will come forth again to meet us. And we will know him then for what he was and is-a Prince-our own black shining Prince!-who didn't hesitate to die, because he loved us so." -Ossie Davis, in his eulogy for Malcolm X

"At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of the 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I s drearily was, a "white man" disillusioned. All my life I'd had white ambitions…. I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensuous gal; the dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like ancient sages in ancient rocking chairs." -Jack Kerouac, On the Road

"A racist Black Muslim heavyweight champion is a bitter pill for racist white America to swallow. Swallow it-or throw the whole bit up, and hope that in the convulsions of your guts, America, you can vomit out the poisons of hate which have led you to a dead end in this valley of the shadow of death." Eldridge Cleaver on Muhammad Ali, Soul on Ice

Yacub's History-The Island of Patmos, 6300 years ago, the original blacks were bred whiter and whiter by a scientist named Yacub. There was a population of 59,999 people originally, bred into the white devil with blue eyes. This is the history of the white race as professed by Elijah Muhammad.

"Do you cut the lining out of your bathing suit so your genitals show through? Do you leave your fly or blouse open a pretend to hold conversations in glass telephone booths, standing so your clothes gap open with no underwear inside? Do you jog without a bra or athletic supporter in order to attract sexual partners? My answer to all of the above is, Well, I do now!" -Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk

"None of these people in Room 234 are Romeos or Casanovas or Don Juans. These aren't Mata Haris or Salomes. These are people you shake hands with every day. Not ugly, not beautiful. You stand next to these legends on the elevator. They serve you coffee. These mythological creatures tear your ticket stub. They cash your paycheck. They put the communion wafer on your tongue."-Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk on Sexual Addicts

"…every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?" -Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk

"In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure." -Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk

"She's shaved. Tanned and oiled so smooth an perfect, she looks less like a woman than just another place to swipe your credit card." -Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk

"I went to the USC School of Medicine long enough to know that a mole is never just a mole. That a simple headache means brain tumors, means double vision, numbness, vomiting followed by seizures, drowsiness, death. A little muscle twitch means rabies, means muscle cramps, thirst, confusion, and drooling, followed by seizures, coma, death. Acne means ovarian cysts. Feeling a little tired means tuberculosis. Bloodshot eyes mean meningitis. Drowsiness is the first sign of typhoid. Those floaters you see cross your eyes on sunny days, they mean your retina is detaching. You're going blind." -Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk

"To stand here and try to fix her life is a big waste of time. People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."-Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk

"People used what they call a telephone because they hated being close together and were too scared to be alone." -Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk

"Where I'm at is one of those stair climbing machines the agent has installed. You climb and climb forever and never get off the ground. You're trapped in your hotel room. It's the mystical sweat lodge experience of our time, the only sort of Indian vision quest we can schedule into our daily planner. Our StairMaster to heaven." -Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk

"We all watch the same television programs, we all hear the same things on the radio, we all repeat the same talk to each other. There are no surprises left. There's just more of the same. Reruns. We all grew up with the same television shows. It's like we all have the same artificial memory implants. We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families. We have the same basic goals. We all have the same fears. The future is not bright. Pretty soon, we'll all have the same thoughts at the same time. We'll be in perfect unison. Synchronized. United. Equal. Exact….Sheep. The big question people ask isn't "what's the nature of existence?" The big question people ask is what's that from?" -Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk

"These people seemed so strange. They didn't blend in with the wilderness, holding it at a safe distance, like a man holding a deadly snake. They had no regard for the land, animals, plants, or even water. Litter was freely tossed…. having no other purpose, it seemed, than to fatten and die…. The faces of this village looked so pained and distorted with sadness that Grandfather wondered what directed these lives into this septic existence…. Their lust for comfort, security, and safety seemed almost barbaric. It was foreign to Grandfather's thinking could consciously insulate themselves so lavishly from the wilderness and life itself." -Grandfather, by Tom Brown Jr.

"…there were no greater or lesser spirits. All were equal. The spirit of the ant was as important as a bear and the spirit of a blade of grass was as important as that of an owl."-Grandfather, by Tom Brown Jr.

"He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin…. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him-except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship…. He poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream."
-Hunter S. Thompson, in his obituary for Richard Nixon

"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity." -HST, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas

"Reading the front page made me feel a lot better. Against that heinous background, my crimes were pale and meaningless. I was a respectable citizen-a multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous. And when the Great Scorer came to write against my name, that would surely make a difference.
Or would it? I turned to the sports page and saw a small item about Muhammad Al; his case was before the Supreme Court, the final appeal. He'd been sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to kill "slopes."
'I ain't got nothing against them Viet Congs,' He said.
Five years." -HST, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas

"Jesus Creeping God! Is there a priest in this tavern? I want to confess! I'm a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor-however you want to call it, Lord…I'm guilty.
But do me just one last favor: just five more high-speed hours before you bring the hammer down; just let me get rid of this goddamn car and off of this horrible desert.
Which is not really a hell of a lot to ask, Lord, because the final incredible truth is that I am not guilty. All I did was take your gibberish seriously… and you see where it got me? My primitive Christian instincts have made me into a criminal….
And now look at me: half-crazy with fear, driving 120 miles and hour across Death Valley in some car I never wanted. You evil bastard! This is your work! You'd better take care of me Lord…because if you don't you're going to have me on your hands." -HST, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas

"Every now and then you run up on one of these days when everything's in vain . . . a stone bummer from start to finish; and if you know what's good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and watch. Maybe think a bit. Lay back on a cheap wooden chair, screened off from the traffic, and shrewdly rip the poptops out of five or eight Budwiesers . . smoke a pack of King Marlboros, eat a peanut-butter sandwich, and finally toward the evening gobble up a wad of good mescaline . . then drive out, later on, to the beach. Get out in the surf, in the fog, and slosh along on numb-frozen feet about ten yards out from the tideline . . . stomping through tribes of wild sandpeckers . . . riderunners, whorehoppers, stupid little birds and crabs and crabs and saltsuckers, with here and there a big pervert or woolly reject gimping off in the distance, wandering alone by themselves behind the dunes and driftwood. . . ." -HST, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas

"Degenerates are our specialty. We cover up things every day that would embarrass the Marquis de Sade" -Secret Service Agent

"…for a whole new style of local government-the kind of government Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he used the word "democracy." We have not done too well with that concept-not in Aspen or anywhere else-and the proof of our failure is the wreckage of Jefferson's dream that haunts us from every side, from coast to coast, on the TV news and a thousand daily newspapers. We have blown it: that fantastic possibility that Abe Lincoln called "the last, best hope of man."
Or maybe not. Not completely anyway. There are people who argue that we can still get a grip on ourselves, and salvage some of the pieces. But not even Nixon would be willing to bet seriously on this chance, and in fact the only thing that makes it worth trying is that we don't really have much choice. The alternatives are too ugly-for out children, if not for ourselves…. This is a nightmare, a bad movie, a terrifying joke on us all. We are shitting our own nest, and the stench is becoming intolerable. Where will it end? When? How? And who will throw the switch?" -HST

"There is some shit I won't eat-unless they pay me to eat it on TV in prime time." -Walt Disney

"They were the real thing. They gave politics a good name, win or lose. People who got up on election day to vote for Fulbright or Al Sr., still talk about it with a sense of pride and even privilege to have voted for men who spoke to the better side of their natures and stood for what was right.
That is a very rare feeling these days, and the bedrock boosters of George Bush or Dan Quayle will never no it-which is sad, because it is a very elegant feeling to wake up in the morning and go down to your neighborhood polling place and come away feeling proud of how you voted." -HST

"It's not easy to balance these hat's on my head, they fall on my head like a dunce, but that's what it means to be human, wearing all your hat's at once." -William Upski Wimsatt, No More Prisons

"At the current level of growth, the prison population by 2020 will reach 12 million people. Approximately 63.3% of all black males ages 18-34 would be incarcerated." -The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Justice Commission

"I believe America is becoming a nation based on fear-not only of crime and so-called bad neighborhoods, but of strangers in general-and it'' destroying everything that's good about us: Our democracy, our diversity, our freedom." -William Upski Wimsatt, No More Prisons

"World War III could happen in our life time and the only thing that's going to prevent it, I think, is ordinary people fighting like Heaven and Hell for our foolish, impossible dreams." -William Upski Wimsatt, No More Prisons

"In real life, someone like Willy Wonka could never own a factory, and even if he did, Veruca Salt's Dad would probably acquire it through a leveraged buy-out, and all the Oompah-Loompahs would be downsized. They'd get arrested for being poor and end up as telemarketers working in prison, or be quarantined and deported by the INS." -William Upski Wimsatt, No More Prisons

"We're uncompromising because we know what time it is, man, because otherwise it's death for our children." -Kwadjo Campbell

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real." "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?" "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you're Real you cant be ugly, except to people who don't understand."~The Velveteen Rabbit

Exit 27 (Airport Road). Take a right at the light. Go to the 5th light and go right onto Campfield Avenue. Go through the 2nd light. The Webster is on the left.

It's an amazing thing when pop music expresses beauty through ambiguity. After being pummeled over the head for years and years with I Love Yous and You Are So Beautifuls, the most direct way of expressing images of love and beauty have pretty much lost all impact. Melodic tricks can wear thin just as easily. Hooks are all well and good, but when you've seen a hook enough times, you know not to bite. -Chuck's Profile

"On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, "Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I gave up my gun back in Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yes's, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open…Learn in to the younguns," he whispered fiercely; then he died." -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"I had a feeling that your people were somehow connected with my destiny. That what happened to you was connected with what would happen to me." -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"You see, he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It's worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn't digest it. Already he is-well, bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!" -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it-that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a straight jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it in your own way-part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy." -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"They? They? Why, the same they we always mean, the white folks, authority, the gods, fate circumstances-the force that pulls your strings until you refuse to be pulled anymore. The big man who's never there, where you think he is." -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"They got all this machinery, but they ain't everything; we the machines inside the machine." -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"What do they do, give you money? Who wahnt that damn stuff? Their money bleed black blood, mahn. It's unclean! Taking their money is shit mahn. Money without dignity-that's bahd shit!" -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"I misjudged you. You have our number. In fact, you must be practically a Negro yourself. Was it by immersion or injection?" -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? -diversity is the word…. Our fate is to become one, and yet many-This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving towards whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he is going." -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"the most immense thing about beauty / is finding it gone." -Charles Bukowski

"if you want to help an alcoholic you / give him a drink / and if you want to help a junkie you / give him a fix. / that asshole Mosk / had it all backwards." -Charles Bukowski

"what I learned was to do it now in spite of the consequences. / and what I also learned was that something once said could / quickly become untrue." -Charles Bukowski

"only boring people are bored. / only the wrong flags fly. / the person who tells you they are not God really thinks otherwise. / God is the inventor of failure. / the only hell is where you are." -Charles Bukowski

"there are times when we should / remember / the strange courage / of the second-rate who refuse to quit / when the nights / are black and long and sleepless / and the days are without / end." -Charles Bukowski

"love is a tiny spot 3 quarters of an inch below the left tit." -Charles Bukowski

"but sometimes we've got to settle for not much; / we need our rest; the great tragedy or the great victory will / arrive soon enough." -Charles Bukowski

"waiting is the greater portion of being alive." -Charles Bukowski

"I've got to tip that son-of-a-bitch out there / when he should be / guillotined." -Charles Bukowski

"we are born into a civilization which is stunned by overwhelming mediocrity….new gods are needed. new doors must be opened. we have waited so long for so little. we must rip the enclosures open. this dark stinks of us, here." -Charles Bukowski

"it gets depressing, there's one old woman, she's got cancer of the ass. anybody else would die! she just won't die! I don't know what to do with her!" -Charles Bukowski

"writing is what one does, it like a spider spinning its web. you do what you have to do." -Charles Bukowski

"This is what passes for civilization. People who would never throw litter form their car will drive past you with their radio blaring. People who'd never blow cigar smoke at you in a crowded restaurant will bellow into their cell phone. They'll shout at each other across the space of a dinner plate…. Outdoors, a bird singing is fine. Patsy Cline is not. Outdoors, the din of traffic is bad enough. Adding Chopin's Piano Concerto in E Minor is not making the situation any better. You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn yours up again…. This is the arms race of sound…. This isn't about quality, it's about volume. This isn't about music, this is about winning." -Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

"These calm-o-phobiacs. No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted." -Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

"Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world." -Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

"Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet." -Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

"What good is intellect if it leaves us immobile and frozen in indecision? At some point, despite all the other options, you have to commit yourself to a path. -Being flexible is fine, it's maybe the greatest talent you can have, but in order to define yourself, you need to pursue your passion. There will always be good reasons not to do something, or to do something else, the world is full of women more beautiful than your wife, you can never choose the best car, there's always a cheaper airfare. What's most important is that you choose and get on with your life." - CHUCK PALAHNIUK (from Pop Matters Interview)

"It helps to know you're not any more responsible for how you look than a car is, you're a product just as much.' A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they're products. Your parents are products.' Their parents were products. Your teachers, products.' The minister in your church, another product." -c-p

"You can't escape the world, and you're not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt ugly. You're not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It's all out of your hands." -Chuck Palahniuk
"The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer.' You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill." -Chuck Palahniuk
"There isn't any real YOU in YOU. Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years." -Chuck Palahniuk
"Skin, bones, blood, and organs transplant from person to person. Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die.' Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited." -Chuck Palahniuk
"'Relax,' Brandy says, 'Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking.' Whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible... All of you is a cooperative effort.'" -Chuck Palahniuk
"Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want.' Do what you're trained not to want.
It's the opposite of following your bliss. Brandy tells me, 'Do the things that scare you the most. '"-Chuck Palahniuk
"Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct." -Chuck Palahniuk
"You spend your entire life becoming God and then you die." -Chuck Palahniuk
"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."

FoodBoyLvr: download krazie bone "hard time hustling"
SirdylanBob: bitch, hell no!

*Do you do you like dreaming of things so impossible or only the practical or ever the wild or waiting through all your bad bad days just to end them with someone you care about?* -DC
*Maybe I never got over you / maybe you're falling for me / maybe this is just like that time on TV when she said this and he said that / but probably not / so tell me how it is / show me where I stand / because not knowing this is killing me / and I never wanted to live so bad *
-A friend...

op157: u sorta remind me of the guy in fight club
op157: the fake one

"do you see / now that you see that / everything they told us / was wrong? // the elephant caught and caged like that? the way they tricked us and caged us too? // how sweetly sad it seems / how sad and sweet / passing lonely people on / the street / the skulls beneath / the skin / the arteries bravely pumping liquid as they rush to do / all the foolish things that / they must do. // but what you don't see / is this clock that says midnight / and this heart in my / self / running on empty. // what you do see is that / what mattered most / doesn't matter anymore." -Charles Bukowski

"Greater men than I have failed to agree with life." -Charles Bukowski

"It's amazing / the number of people who can't feel / pain. // Put 40 in a room / squeezed against each other // Rows of lethargic talk / and they don't faint / scream / go mad / or even / wince. // It appears as if they are waiting for / something that will never / arrive. // They are as comfortable as chickens or / pigs in their pens." -Charles Bukowski

"It was not my strength that needed nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing." -Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"The best reason I have come up with for looking closely at into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about my existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand it's legacy." -Phillip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"I remember what people said. 'I don't want to die in the street, I want to die at home.' When you're that resigned and oppressed you're already dead." -Laurent Nkongoli, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us, and, looking back, there are these discrete tracks of memory: the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others' ideas of us, and the more private times when we are freer to imagine ourselves…. But listening to Odette, it occurred to me that if others have so often made your life their business - made your life into a question, really, and made that question their business - then perhaps you will want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and inviolably your own." -Phillip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

" 'Sometimes,' Paul told me, 'I felt myself dead.' 'Dead?' I said. 'Already dead?' Paul considered for a moment. Then he said, 'Yeah.'" -Phillip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"I haven't even started my real mourning of the apathy and the absolute detachment of the international community, and particularly of the Western world, for the plight of Rwandans. Because, fundamentally, to be very candid and soldierly, who the hell cared about Rwanda? I mean, face it. Essentially, how many people still remember the genocide in Rwanda? We know the genocide of the Second World War because the whole outfit was involved. But who is really involved in the Rwandan genocide? Who comprehends that more people were killed, injured, and displaced in three and a half months in Rwanda than in the whole of the Yugoslavian campaign in which we poured sixty thousand troops and the whole of the western world was there, and we're pouring billions in there, still trying to solve the problem. How much is really being done to solve the Rwandan problem? Who is grieving for Rwanda and really living it and living with the consequences? I mean, there are hundreds of Rwandans whom I knew personally whom I found slaughtered with their families complete-and bodies up to here-villages totally wiped out…and we made all that information available daily and the international community kept watching." -General Dallaire, UNAMIR

"Do you want to know what genocide is? A cheese sandwich. Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich. What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich? Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit? Crimes against humanity. Where's humanity? Who's humanity? You? Me? Did you ever see a crime committed against you? Hey, just a million Rwandans. Did you ever hear of the genocide convention? That convention, makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich." -Unnamed American Military Intelligence Officer, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"We live in the flicker-may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday." -Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"People will say I'm an extremist because I can't accept of tolerate the people who killed my family. So if they're afraid once in their lives-I was afraid since I was three years old-let them know how it feels…. The children don't go out-you have to push them-they like to stay home. They think about it a lot. My little Patrick, he goes alone into a room, and he looks under the bed for interahhamwe. *" -Odette Byiramilimo, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, has been translated as 'the all powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake,' and also as 'the cock who leaves no hen alone.'" -Phillip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"Some wounded Tutsis came out of the bush where they had been hiding. One was a boy who had contrived to cover only the back of his neck. When he let the covering fall away, they saw that his head had been cut almost halfway off, exposing his spine and a patch of cranium. A doctor had sewed the boy back together, and I saw him walking tentatively around an emergency field hospital at Kitchanga." -Phillip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"Lets say we have a hundred thousand young people who lost their families and have no hope, no future…. they're not looking forward to a future with optimism…. It will require a lot to make sure that these people can come back to society and look at the future and say, 'Yes, let us try'" -Bonaventure Nyibizi, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"That's why we say, in the short run, let political competition not be based on groups, let it be based on individuals. We are not likely to have healthy groups. We are likely to have unhealthy groups. So why take this risk? If I have got a heart problem and I try to appear healthy, then I will just die." -Museveni, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"Maybe that's why I don't put on a lot of weight-these thoughts keep consuming me." -General Kagame, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves-Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls had said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately. Rwandans have no need-no room in their corpse crowded imaginations-for more martyrs. None of us does. But mightn't we all take sine courage for the example of those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans?" -Phillip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow we Will be Killed With Our Families

"the dark is empty; / most of our heroes have been / wrong." -Charles Bukowski

"I feel gypped by dunces / as if reality is the property / of little men / with luck and a head start, / and I sit in the cold" -Charles Bukowski

"when children say funny and brilliant things / like savages / trying to send a message through / their bodies while their bodies are still / alive enough to transmit and fell and run up / and down without locks and paychecks and / ideals and possessions and beetle-like opinions." -Charles Bukowski

"I am not aiming high / I am only trying to keep myself alive / just a little longer" -Charles Bukowski

"sometimes you've got to kill 4 or 5 / thousand men before you somehow / get to believe that the sparrow / is immortal, money is piss and / that you have been wasting / your time." -Charles Bukowski

"good morning, nice day isn't it? / a fat woman says / I am unable to answer / and down the sidewalk I go / shamed / unable to tell her / of the knife inside me" -Charles Bukowski

"a living man, truly alive, / say when he brings his hands down / from lighting a cigarette / you see his eyes / like the eyes of a tiger staring past / into the wind." -Charles Bukowski

"but today I know that I have gotten out of / some kind of net, / 30 seconds more and I would have been dead, / and it is important to recognize / one should recognize / that type of moment" -Charles Bukowski

"some people never go crazy. / what truly horrible lives / they must lead." -Charles Bukowski

"in one years time I have lived / through moments that have / seemed like years and am ever / convinced of the changing / seasons. From love to love and / confusion to confusion I have / experienced experience in tears / and smiles but all has not been / as extreme. I am most often con- / templative, stoic, or somewhere / in between. Somewhere / between self-hating and Brooklyn. / …and here I am now, between / self-hate and Brooklyn. Hating / myself for loving, changing, and refusing to stand still when muthafuckas seem intent on / keeping me in my place. My / place is unmapped, / perhaps undiscovered, / and surely gravity free." -Saul Williams

"at a moments notice / notice moments / in the Dadaist train of thought / time is naught / but a series of intertwining moments / which we have no choice but to action over." -Saul Williams

"this morning, when you got there, and it was quiet, and the machines were yearning behind you, yearning for their nigger, to come give up his life. Standing there, being dissed, and broke. My mistake was I kept saying it was proof that god didn't exist. And you told me, "Naw, but it's proof the devil do." -The Roots

"On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car." -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
"There is nothing so unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti, and all the windows smashed…. for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it's at these days. Where indeed?" -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

"There are issues enough. What is gone is a popular passion for them. Possibly, hope is gone. The failure of hope would be a terrible event; the blacks have never been cynical about America. But conversation you hear among the young now, on the South Side of Chicago, up in Harlem or in Bedford-Stuyvesant, certainly suggests the birth of a new cynicism. In the light of what government is doing, you might well expect your blacks to lose hope in the power elites, but this is something different - a cold personal indifference, a separation of man from man. What you hear and see is not rage, but injury, a withering of expectations." -D.J.R. Bruckner, 1/6/72 in the LA Times

"So much for objective journalism. Don't bother to look for it here- not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is not such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction of terms." -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

"the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy." -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

"You know, it's taken me half the goddamn day to figure out what it is that bothers me about these people. I've covered a lot of Democratic campaigns, but I've never felt out of place before-never personally uncomfortable with the people. It's obvious, and I've finally figured it out. You know what it is? It's because these people act like goddamned Republicans!" -Unnamed Reporter, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

"Compared to the democratic convention five weeks earlier, the Nixon celebration was an ugly, low-level trip that hovered somewhere in that grim indefinable limbo between dullness and obscenity-like a bad pornographic film that you want to walk out on, but sit through anyway and then leave the theater feeling depressed and vaguely embarrassed with yourself for ever having taken part in it, even as a spectator." -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

"Hear me, people; we now have to deal with another race-small and feeble when our fathers first me them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule." -Chief Sitting Bull, 1877

"Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?" -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

" 'Couldn't we live together, Brett? Couldn't we just live together?'
'I don't think so. I'd just tromper you with everybody. You couldn't stand it.'
'I stand it now.'
'That would be different. It's my fault, Jake. It's the way I'm made.'
'Couldn't we go off in the country for a while?'
'It wouldn't be any good. I'll go if you like. But I couldn't live quietly in the country. Not with my own true love.'
'I know.'
'Isn't it rotten? There isn't any use my telling you I love you.'
'You know I love you.'
'Lets not talk. Talking's all bile.'" - Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

"if we outlawed everything that drove men mad, the whole social structure would drop out - marriage, the war, bus service, slaughterhouses, bee keeping, surgery, anything you can name can drive men mad because society is built on false stilts. until we knock the whole bottom out and rebuild, the madhouses will be overlooked. and cuts in mad-house budgets by our good governor are taken by me to mean indirectly imply that those driven insane by society are not fit to be supported and cured by society, especially in an inflationary and tax-mad age." -Charles Bukowski

"Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he has no time to enjoy it." -Charles Bukowski

"Do the Israelis rely on God to take care of them? I think not, Howard. Their gods are tanks and machine guns and rockets and jet fighters…. The Israelis don't worship tanks and machine guns and rockets because they can see them but because they trust them: these things can be relied on to do something for them." -Daniel Quinn, The Holy

"For some men-perhaps all men-it's almost a necessity to do insane things from time to time: to confront the wild boar alone, spear in hand, to see the world from the top of an unscaleable mountain, to risk ones entire fortune on the turn of a card. I think it's true of all men, personally, though nowadays most try to get along on risks taken by deputies-deputies in the boxing ring and on the football field…. When a man sets out to do something like this, he's not testing his manhood. He's testing the universe itself-he's testing the gods, if you will. He's finding out where he stands in the order of things. To best the rabbit or the deer means nothing, tells him nothing. But while he stalks the boar, he puts his fate to the test: he lives in the hands of the gods." -Daniel Quinn, The Holy

"You didn't ordinarily think of nice, conventional, middle-class people folks reasoning that way; but then you didn't ordinarily think of nice, conventional, middle-class folks keeping tidy records of the number of Jews gassed in camp today either." -Daniel Quinn, The Holy

"This world of matter isn't your true home. Isn't that what they tell you? They say this world is just a station on your journey -a testing ground. Your true home is elsewhere -in heaven -far, far from here, utterly beyond the soiling touch of matter…. They teach you that this world is trash: corrupt, vile, unwholesome, malign…The God worshipped by your kind…he's remote and sublime, unsullied by the world…he's a stranger, sequestered beyond the farthest galaxy, beyond matter itself. A cosmic absence: silent, unresponsive, indifferent -but hungry for adoration." -Daniel Quinn, The Holy

"If God really was God, why did he have to go through all that elaborate rigmarole to free his people from the Egyptians -the plagues, the locusts, the boils, the maggots, the hailstones, the killing of the first born, the parting of the Red Sea, and so on? Why not just snap his fingers and make all the Egyptians vanish instantly? Or even better, why not just snap his fingers and transport his people to the Promised Land instantly?…God didn't want his people to be transported to the Promised Land. He wanted them to reach the Promised Land transformed by the journey." -Daniel Quinn, The Holy

"James Brown fascinated white kids in the 60's with a peephole glimpse of a world of grace and grit. But the black rapper DMX and before him Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. now offer a wide-screen movie of ghetto life, relishing the details, relating the intricacy of topics like drug dealing, brawling, pimping, and black-on-black crime. Rap makes these things seem sexy, and it makes life on the streets seem as thrilling as a playstation game. Pimping and gangbanging equal rebellion, especially for white kids who aren't going to get pulled over for driving while black, let alone die in a hail of bullets." -RJ Smith, New York Times Sunday Magazine

"It's easy to slip into a parallel universe. …Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from…. Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco." -Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted

"What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting on welfare lines?" -Saul Alinsky

"We said 'Stick 'em up motha-fucka, we come for what's ours!' and that crowd just went wild." -Bobby Seale

" 'Have you ever noticed,' the rabbit said to Alice, 'the more clocks we have, the less time?'" -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

"I used to believe in things when I was little." -Homer Simpson

"Those thrown overboard / had overheard / the mysteries of the undertow / and understood / that down below / there would be no more chains / the surrendered breath and name / and survived / countless as rain." -Saul Williams

"what's your plan for spiritual health? / calling reality unreal / your line of thought is tangled / the star spangled / got your soul mangled / your being's angled / forbidding you to be real and feel / you can't find truth with an ax or a drill / in a white house on a hill / or in factories made of steel / stealing me / was the smartest thing you ever did / too bad you don't teach the truth / to your kids / my influence on you is the reflection you see / when you look into your minstrel mirror / and talk about your culture." -Saul Williams

"It was grandfathers watch and when he gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his or his fathers. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools." -William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

"Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar. Man the sum of his climatic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire." -William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

"They come into white peoples lives like that in sudden sharp black trickles that isolate white facts for an instant in unarguable truth like under a microscope; the rest of the time just voices that laugh when you see nothing to laugh at, tears when you see no reason for tears." -William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

"Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept from trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away." -William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

"'Then you're being a fool,' I says.
'Well,' he says. 'I don't spute dat neither. Ef dat uz a crime, all chain-gangs wouldn't be black.'" -William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

"'Our actions are governed by utility,' Bazarov said. 'In these days negation is the most useful thing of all-and so we deny.'" -Ivan Turganev, Fathers and Sons

" Incidentally, I have just mentioned the word 'happiness.' Now you will tell my why, even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a pleasant evening party, or a conversation in agreeable company -why it all seems no more than just a hint of some boundless happiness existing elsewhere rather than actual happiness, or any such happiness as may never really be granted to us?" -Madame Odintzov, Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turganev

"The confined space I occupy is so minute when compared with the rest of the universe, where I am not and have no business to be' and the fraction of time I shall live is so infinitesimal when contrasted with eternity, in which I have never been and never shall be…. And yet here, in this atom of myself, in this mathematical point, blood circulates, the brain is active, aspiring to something too…. What a monstrous thing! How absurd it seems!" -Bazarov, Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turganev

"It was sharply different from the west where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself." -The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry." -The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Why only five years ago (1989), hip-hop fans weren't interested in skills or beats, we felt we were somehow part of-imagine this! -a righteous cause. Chuck D was going to train 500 black leaders in 5 years. KRS-ONE was going to write a book and distribute a zillion free copies to every man, woman and child. The words 'master plan' showed up in every other rhyme and the words 'sell out' actually carried some weight." -William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs

"Right now, America's teaching that we (black people) are just entertainment. Put the ball in. Carry the ball. Run with it. Make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me dance. But never in a situation where we're making decisions. A man bringing something to the table rather than the entertainment at lunch break." -Reginald Jolley

"The most promising thing about spilled milk is that it has ventured from its container. The most promising thing about the (wigger) is that he is defying in some way the circumstances of his birth. He harbors curiosity and admiration for a people his people have stepped on. He lives by fascinations rather than by his habits, his awkwardness rather than his cool." -William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs

"In Afrika, it was called the Disaster. That's what I call it. It wasn't a trade to us. We didn't trade anything. Europeans created all these problems." -Aaron Brown

"…there is a tragic misconception among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills. In truth, time itself is only neutral. Increasingly, I feel that time has been used destructively by people of ill will much more than it has been used constructively by people of good will." -Martin Luther King Jr.

"In my own country I am in a far-off land
I am strong but have no force or power
I win all yet remain a loser
At break of day I say goodnight
When I lie down I have a great fear
Of falling." -Francis Villon

"Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horror which surrounds us…We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day?" -Henry Miller, The World of Sex

"…the weary expressions of half-bright souls turned mean and nervous from too much bitter wisdom in too few years." -Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angels

"Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and the half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delight human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin." -Frank Moore Colby, Imaginary Obligations

"There is a beautiful consistency about Buzzard; he is a porcupine among men, with his quills always flared. If he won a new car with a raffle ticket bought in his name by some momentary girlfriend, he would recognize it at once as a trick to con him out of a license fee. He would denounce the girl as a hired slut, beat up the raffle sponsor, and trade off the car for five hundred Seconals and a gold handled cattle prod." -Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angels

"Barger would sit in his living room and listen patiently to everything the Vietnam Day Committee had to say, then brush it all aside. The Berkley people argued long and well, but they never understood that they were talking on a different frequency. It didn't matter how many beards, busts or acid caps they could muster; Sonny considered them all chickenshit-and that was that." -Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angels

"A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit -no matter how often he's reminded of it -that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley…. Very few toads in this world are Prince Charmings in disguise. Most are simply toads…and they are going to stay that way…Toads don't make laws or change any basic structures, but one or two rooty insights can work powerful changes in the way they get through life. A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell's Angels' view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency." -Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angels

"There were other outlaws who missed the brass ring in the fifties. Lenny Bruce was one of them; he was never quite right for television. Bruce had tremendous potential until about 1961, when the people who had been getting such a kick out of him suddenly realized he was serious." -Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angels