Humorous Sayings

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.

Who dares to strike today, when having the security of a permanent job is itself becoming a privilege?

What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

We're not dreamers. We're awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We're not destroying anything. We're watching the system destroy itself.

You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things.

There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; fro…

The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie – the truth lies outside, in what we do.

If we only change reality in order to realise our dreams, and do not change these dreams themselves, sooner or later we regress back to the old reality.

We're beings toward death, we're featherless, two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us.

I'm a jazzman in the life of the mind. I'm a bluesman in the world of ideas. I'm a participant.

A lot of folk who have lost faith in God it's a very healthy thing because the God they lost faith in was probably an idol anyway.

At our best. Now, I'm not romanticizing black people, because we've got gangsters like everybody else. [laughs] But oh, Lord, we got some great ones.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a…

There's a certain rhythmic seduction to the word [nigger].

If the only alternative to fascism we produce is a corporate-driven, milquetoast, neoliberal Democratic Party, fascism will come to America. Let us be very clear. It's like a Weimar America.

You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it.