Editor's Note:
If you’re stirred by these author quotes, amble down our archive for more.
“A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.” So goes a quote attributed to Guy Fawkes after his failed attempt on assassinating King James 1 of England in 1605. While the commemoration of that plot has changed drastically over the centuries (up to and including the more recent co-opting of that “V for Vendetta” mask by disillusioned American activists), every November 5th Fawkes’s revolutionary spirit persists in inspiring us to question exactly what we’re fighting against, and what the heck we’re prepared to do about it.
Many more insightful and eloquent voices have spoken up since Fawkes’s time, inciting reform and outright rebellion in countries all over the world — and many of these managed to lay down a literary path along the way, so that future generations might apply these observations in their struggle toward a (hopefully) better world.
1. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794
“It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.”
2. Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 1910
“Ask for work. If they don’t give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”
3. Hellen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life, 1929
“I believe that life, not wealth, is the aim of existence — life including all its attributes of love, happiness, and joyful labour. I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system, but even if I am wrong I believe that truth can lose nothing by agitation but may gain all.”
4. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcom X, 1965
“Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”
5. Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, 1992
“I’ve learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.”
6. Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture, 1994
“I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.”
7. Koigi wa Wamwere, I Refuse to Die, 2002
“Because we stood outside European culture, colonialists claimed we had no civilization. But we had our own civilization that to us was more advanced than the European one because it gave us land, food, freedom, identity, spiritual peace and happiness. To the extent that our civilization met our needs, we were not primitive. Europeans considered themselves more advanced because they could conquer, kill and rob more efficiently. Black people could not possibly prefer a civilization that killed and colonized them to their own.”
8. Ariel Dorfman, “The World That Harold Pinter Unlocked,” 2008
“You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.”
9. Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, 2014
“Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else.”