Quotes

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.
-- Emile Cioran (1911-1995)

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
-- Denis Diderot, "On the Interpretation of Nature" (1753)

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
-- Albert Einstein

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
-- Albert Einstein

The major reason for art is to enable us to share -- and sensitize ourselves to -- both the surfaces and the structures of experiences existing on temperamental and moral coordinates different from our own. It's what you're slowest to approve of that teaches you the most.
-- Raymond Durgnat

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.
-- Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, 1963

...Björk's pitch, cadence and enunciation are so unpredictable you could start a drinking game around them. She's the anti-Sinatra, and one weird pixie.
-- D. Strauss, The New York Observer

Sentient compassion is a must; it has to be developed in order to alleviate cruelty and thoughtless acts. That won't happen if you develop a sense of compassion. You'll have that connectedness, that knowing that the same life that's in you is in every other being, so you're not going to mishandle life.
-- David S. Ware

People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
-- Joseph Campbell, Myth and the Modern World

Man, if Al Green had one tit, I'd marry that motherfucker!!
-- Miles Davis

It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green.
--Robert Christgau

In Japan, I'm a God. They worship me, man. They'll cut your ass all over the place if you talk about Jimmy Smith.
-- Jimmy Smith

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
-- Albert Einstein

Evolution is the phenomenon of change and the challenge of the next time cycle will involve the creation of constructs that will provide the kind of dynamic knowledge base that can assist the challenges of tomorrow (involving both fundamental and extended information).
-- Anthony Braxton, "The Logic of Animate Behaviour"

Music ever afresh is needed to renew creative life-forces and reaffirm the inexhaustible potential of human existence.
-- Eddie Prevost

Cage found that in order to be a contributing world citizen, he had, with artifice and discipline, to continually reinvent the "gift" that life's brutality always threatens to eradicate, the gift of good-humored openness to constructive possibility.
-- Joan Retallack on John Cage

When somebody asked Cage if he thought there was too much suffering in the world, he said, "No, just the right amount" -- and I think the Spice Girls are a part of that!
-- Keith Rowe

What is this? A furniture demonstration?
-- Derek Bailey upon hearing a composition by Conlon Nancarrow

(while in bathroom stalls)
Steve: "You got toilet paper over there?"
Meldrick: "No."
Steve: "You got five singles for a $5?"
-- Homicide: Life on the Streets TV series, "Three Men and Adina" episode

For me that's where the music always has to be -- on the edge -- in between the known and the unknown and you have to keep pushing it towards the unknown otherwise it and you die.
-- Steve Lacy

I didn't get where I am today by being timid, young man.
-- Evan Parker

For love - I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.
-- Robert Creeley, "The Warning"

INSTRUCTION TO THE PEOPLES OF THE EARTH:
You must realize that you have the right to love beauty. You must prepare to live life to the fullest extent. Of course it takes imagination, but you don't have to be an educated person to have that. Imagination can teach you the true meaning of pleasure. Listening can be one of the greatest of pleasures. You must learn to listen, because by listening you will learn to see with your mind's eye. You see, music paints pictures that only the mind's eye can see. Open your ears so that you can see with the eye of the mind.
-- Sun Ra

Sun Ra's spirit was too universalistic to stop at the wretched limits of race in human history.... His concern was the confusion and disorder which waste the potential for beauty and happiness in our world, and the possibilities for seeing beyond the limits of anger, immediate gratification and even death.
-- John Szwed

A fellow said every time he talks to me there's a boundary that he can't get past, he asked me why. I talked to him, I said, "Well, I'm not really supposed to talk to humans."
-- Sun Ra

Improvised music is not a pastime. It upsets notions of music as leisure and as a consumable because it fixes on the unrelenting 'now'. It is a means of self-realisation, not an escape from reality.
-- Eddie Prevost

At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.
-- Samuel Beckett's "Molloy"

Now newly mixed and mastered, with errors in pitch and speed finally corrected....
-- from John DeAngelis's liner notes to a reissue of Philosophy Of The World by The Shaggs

The point of music is to incite revolution, spiritually and politically. Music should wake up human beings to live as deeply as they can. It should help them to overthrow their old selves and become new people. When it's experienced on a high level, it can change people's lives.
-- William Parker

If silence and noise are two aspects of the same condition (white and black), their equality becomes a metaphor for awareness of life, the details of nature and our position within them.
-- Art Lange, liner notes to John Cage's Winter Music (hatART)

Theatre takes place all the time, wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.
-- John Cage

This place is terribly underdeveloped. It's a place of barking dogs and deaf lizards.
-- Karlheinz Stockhausen on our world, Towards a Cosmic Music [17]

When a certain piece of music penetrates a person, a resonance is set in motion and an inner voice says: "I like this resonance. It elevates me. It develops hitherto unknown possibilities in me. I don't recognize myself. This is very interesting."
-- Karlheinz Stockhausen, Towards a Cosmic Music [48]

Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, "edgemen," who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination. In their productions we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalized and fixed in structure.
-- Victor Turner, The Ritual Process [128]

Bitches Brew is not a frozen chicken.
-- Wayne Shorter [Down Beat, Dec 1999]

You got to get the chicken... you ain't gettin' the chicken.
-- Miles Davis to Lenny White [during the Bitches Brew sessions, 1969]

[The] limitation in our ability to perceive broad distinctions in scope can be applied to our moral and temporal responses.... We agonize over a dinner menu, or have engine trouble on the way to work; and for seconds or minutes our cosmos shrinks to a miniscule volume of being, an epic of cheese sauces or tragedy of fanbelts.
-- Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living [57]

Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one's teeth.
-- Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living [59]

Going to a movie so you won't be offended is like eating potato chips made with Olestra; you avoid the dangers of the real thing, but your insides fill up with synthetic runny stuff.
-- Roger Ebert

John Corbett: I wonder if there's any area where the two of you strongly disagree? In improvising contexts, sometimes disagreeing is an important component.
Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg: Yes!

Anthony Braxton: I love the solo experience. I can do anything I want in the solo experience, including totally fail and have a pie thrown at me.
Ted Panken: Hopefully it's well baked.
Anthony Braxton: Well, hopefully. Or at least the kind of fruit pie strategies that won't hurt so much.

Murder is a crime, describing murder is not.
Sex is not a crime, describing sex is.
Why?
-- G. Legman

Snack food should always accompany the moving image, but it should be the kind of soft crunchies that are strictly tactile and don't involve the eyes. Those must, for the main part, be focused on the screen. Toothpicks are vital in order not to break the visual concentration by contortions of the tongue as it tries to dislodge chips and chunks of dubious merit. The whole idea is to forget about the stomach and that's why you have to appease it via the candy counter. The head, heart, and hairy area below the stomach is what should be stimulated at the cinema. Also the ears.
-- George Kuchar

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
-- Albert Einstein

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.
-- Albert Einstein

My hope is that we will use this time space to renew our relationship with cultural dynamics and begin again the fight for the challenge of composite existence and positive experience. We must rededicate ourselves to the hope of world peace, human rights, and cosmic destiny. The challenge of creative music has never been more important than in periods of profound unrest and re-alignment. There can be no doubt that we have the creative talent on this planet that can assist world evolution and dynamic spirituality (and cohesion) -- suddenly, there will be a need for 'speculative assumptions' that give insight into the changing vibrational and communal landscape. Creativity is the engine of evolution and healing. We are now in a new era, and there is everything to do.
-- Anthony Braxton responding to the events of 11-Sep-2001

When I hear the word 'independent' I reach for my revolver. At this point, what the hell does that mean? The English Patient is an independent film. Hootie and the Blowfish are alternative music. I'm the Queen of Denmark. I don't know what it means anymore.
-- Jim Jarmusch

As a grand-scale artwork created by the labor of many hands, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle might reasonably be compared to a Gothic cathedral, if Chartres could twitch its ass in your face.
-- Stuart Klawans

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.
-- Montaigne

Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good, but if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell.
-- Clint W. Murchison

The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts.
-- Bertrand Russell

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Freedom can reside only in a point of view, a way of looking upon the system of necessity. *** Surely this is the one freedom that we may attain to: not to be released from physical reality, but to understand reality and ourselves as part of it, and so be reconciled to what we are.
-- Roger Scruton, Spinoza

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
-- Lord Acton, History of Freedom

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
-- Jean Anouilh, French playwright

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
-- Aristotle, Politics

Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
-- Epicurus

You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
-- Joan Baez

God, or rather the fiction of God, is the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, Oeuvres, vol. 1

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians or poets: the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871)

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
-- Mikhail Bakunin

Clairvoyant, n. A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron -- namely, that he is a blockhead.

Clergyman, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.

Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.

Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
-- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-3)

I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get.
-- Napoleon Bonapart

How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares, "God wills it thus." Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
-- Napoleon Bonapart

Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate and reckless of consequence, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.
-- Polybius, Histories (c. 125 BCE)

It is a curious paradox of human history that a doctrine that tells human beings to regard themselves as sacrificial animals has been accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for mankind.
--Nathaniel Branden (psychologist)

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
-- David Brooks, The Necessity of Atheism

The trick is, after all, obvious. The Theist takes terms that can apply to sentient life alone, and applies them to the universe at large. He talks about means, that is, the deliberate planning to achieve certain ends, and then says that as there are means there must be ends. Having, unperceived, placed the rabbit in the hat, he is able to bring it forth to the admiration of his audience.
-- Chapman Cohen, "Deity and Design" (1912)

The predominant emphasis on the motive of fear for the enforcement of absolute commands has made religious morality develop the most intense cruelty that the human heart has known.
-- Morris R. Cohen (1880-1947, philosopher/educator)

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
-- Richard Dawkins

Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.
-- John Dewey

There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.
-- John Dewey

Apologists for a religion often point to the shift that goes on in scientific ideas and materials as evidence of the unreliability of science as a mode of knowledge. They often seem peculiarly elated by the great, almost revolutionary, change in fundamental physical conceptions that has taken place in science during the present generation. Even if the alleged unreliability were as great as they assume (or even greater), the question would remain: Have we any other recourse for knowledge? But in fact they miss the point. Science is not constituted by any particular body of subject matter. It is constituted by a method, a method of changing beliefs by means of tested inquiry.... Scientific method is adverse not only to dogma but to doctrine as well.... The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.
-- John Dewey

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
-- Frederick Douglass

Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
-- Margaret Mead

If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.
-- Theodore Dreiser

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
-- Epicurus (341-270 BC)

Because morality is a social necessity, the moment faith in god is banished, man's gaze turns from god to man and he becomes socially conscious. Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality.
-- Gora (Shri Goparaju Ramachandra Rao, 1902-1975), "Atheism and Morality" in Atheism Questions and Answers

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former -- of the corruption of the will.
-- Alexander Herzen (Russian writer, 1812-1870), From the Other Shore, "Omnia Mea Mecum Porto" (1855)

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

-- Baron d'Holbach (French philosopher, 1723-89), Système de la Nature

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
-- Elbert Hubbard

In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.
-- Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (1986)

Religion is all profit. They have no merchandise to buy, no commissions to pay, and no refunds to make for unsatisfactory service and results.... Their commodity is fear.
-- Joseph Lewis (1889-1968)

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
-- Robert M. Pirsig

One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
-- George Orwell

Kill a man, one is a murderer; kill a million, a conqueror; kill them all, a God.
-- Jean Rostand (French biologist), Pensées d'un Biologiste (1939)

The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology.
-- Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, "Philosophy and Politics" (1950)

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dares not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.
-- Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
-- George Bernard Shaw

Fanaticism in the name of religion seems to be the great temptation of the age. It is religion without integrity: misled, misguided, angry, insolent, vindictive, hateful, vengeful. It is a crusade in the name of God to rid the earth of all infidels and unbelievers who dare defile the rare atmosphere of heady faith. Dissent is not tolerated. Intelligence is frowned upon unless it is dogmatic and closed. Disturbing questions, clear thinking and common sense are thought to be irreverent, insolent and disrespectful of proper authority.
This fanaticism blends politics with religion until basic and important distinctions are blurred. Zealous nationalism takes on the face of fervent religion; patriotism is baptized as kingdom service; love of country is tantamount to love of God and military ventures are regarded as pure paths of martyrdom and Christian service.
Such religion has an ugly face -- the scowl of the true believer -- the smirk of the conscienceless killer who can do no wrong for it is done in the name of a higher purpose that justifies the wanton act.
-- Paul D. Simmons (Professor of Christian Ethics), Report from the Capital, 40, April 1985

The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy.
-- George H. Smith, Why Atheism? (2000)

Christianity cannot erase man's need for pleasure, nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however, and what it has been extremely effective in accomplishing, is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure, when accompanied by guilt, becomes a means of perpetuating chronic guilt, and this serves to reinforce one's dependence on God. Christianity, with some exceptions, has never explicitly advocated human misery; it prefers instead to speak of sacrifices in this life so that benefits may be garnered in the life to come. One invests in this life, so to speak, and collects interest in the next. Fortunately for Christianity, the dead cannot return for a refund.

Through inculcating the notion that sacrifice is a virtue, Christianity has succeeded in convincing many people that misery incurred through sacrifice is a mark of virtue. Pain becomes the insignia of morality -- and conversely, pleasure becomes the insignia of immorality. Christianity, therefore, does not say, "Go forth and be miserable." Rather, it says, "Go forth and practice the virtue of self-sacrifice." In practical terms, these commands are identical.
-- George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
-- Gerry Spence

There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
-- Gertrude Stein

Three antihuman religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the omnipotent father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the skygod and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not just for one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
-- Gore Vidal, "Monotheism and its Discontents," The Nation

Do we want a free society or a patriarchal one? My question is not rhetorical.

Patriarchal. From the Latin pater, father. As in father knows best. A patriot, then, is someone who serves the fatherland. The notion of the father as chief of chiefs is prehistoric. From this tribal conceit derives monotheism: the idea of a single god-creator who has created at least half of us in his image....

Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.

--Gore Vidal, The Nation, (Aug-27/Sep-0 3, 1990)

I don't think we're here for anything, we're just products of evolution. You can say, 'Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose,' but I'm anticipating a good lunch.
-- James Watson

The total absence of humor in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
-- Robert A. Wilson, Right Where You Are Sitting Now

Tax the FUCK out of the churches!
-- Frank Zappa

You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
-- Frank Zappa

We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life's highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
-- Paulo Freire (1921-1997, Brazilian educationalist)

Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
-- Hermann Göring, at his Nuremberg trial

Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.
-- Magdalena Abakanowicz (Polish sculptor)

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
--Mahatma Gandhi (1869--1948), "Non-Violence in Peace and War"

[While studying architecture with Goldfinger, I overheard him] saying, "To be an architect, one must devote one's life solely to architecture." I then left him, for, as I explained, there were other things that interested me, music and painting for instance. After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."
-- John Cage

The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.'
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968

"Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. The corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person." -- ??

Expressing our politics through what we buy is no politics at all; at best it is but a vote of assent for the existing economic arrangements. Were we to value such a debased notion of freedom, we would be celebrating the way capitalism tries to cheat us out of more meaningful freedoms, foremost of which is the freedom to question the way modes of production are organized. If we forget that what we buy is insignificant as long as we continue to buy something, then we fall prey to one of our society's favorite myths: that corporations actually value their customers as individuals, that they really believe that the customer is right.
***
For as long as we play on their field, we continue to be the sorts of people their industries require. And for my purposes, that is what consumerism is: a series of behaviors that identifies us to the existing order and fixes us in it while granting us a sense of identity that feels natural, that feels autonomously constructed. Never mind if these identities seem conformist or mass-produced — we won't know enough about anybody else besides ourselves to notice. Our access to goods allows us to build an identity without the hassles of dealing with actual other people. Again, we are all creative and sensitive people. The unique, imaginary playpens we each construct for ourselves in our narcissistic world of goods proves to ourselves just how creative and sensitive we are. Consumerism is the driving social force that seeks to ensure that each of our playpens remains isolated from the others; it is the wet nurse that comes when we cry, hungry for real experience, only to feed us more formula.
--Rob Horning, "The Myth of the Rebel Consumer"

How many digits would it take to quantify the ratio of recent media mentions of a "war on terrorism" compared to a "war on poverty"? And how often have you heard a newscaster on a television network — or, for that matter, a correspondent for NPR News — allude to the fact that poverty continues to kill vastly more people than "terrorism" ever has?
-- Norman Solomon, "The Limits of Media Dream Machines"

The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis [of World War II]. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
--Vice President Henry A. Wallace, 1944

Q: Are you Catholic?
Michael Snow: No.
Q: Are you religious?
Snow: No.
Q: Do you believe in anything?
Snow: Anything? Yes, I believe in anything.
source

People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
--John Cage on what the use of music is or could be

[I]mprovised music making is almost the only art form where it's a genuinely collaborative, creative process. Of course, you can have collaborations between all kinds of disciplines in the arts, but not in that kind of vulnerable, mutually dependent way that occurs in group improvising. You have to make decisions moment by moment in the music according to the other players' input, which may well upset and distort what your own intentions were. You have to find a way of modifying your intentions to have some meaningful correlation with what other people are doing. People with very strong musical opinions somehow have to coexist and find a way of playing that sounds like more than the sum of the parts. If it's working, it's got to come up with ideas that couldn't have been imagined by any of the individual members on their own. Getting to those parts that could only have been reached by going through what came before, that you couldn't have just started with. That's the motivation: those surprises you get, not the same thing every night.
--John Butcher, Signal to Noise (Fall 2004)

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
--Marcel Proust

Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.
--Walt Whitman

The modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism is loyalty to the nation ALL the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it.
--Mark Twain, "The Czar's Soliloquy" (1905)

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
--Baron De Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.
--Clarence Darrow

Each component of the organism, like the individual in the social body, possesses the capacity for enjoyment of the self through sharing with others.
--Raoul Vaneigem, A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings

Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch).
-- Michael Snow, "Crushed Cookies Make Crumbs Liberates Swing. Cuts Its Pulse." (1978)

A funk a day keep the Nose away
Mind your wants 'cause someone wants your mind
Funk is a non-profit organization
Peck me lightly, like a woodpecker with a headache
--Parliament, "Funkentelechy" (Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome, 1977)

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
--Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" (1964)

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
--Upton Sinclair

[Artists are] mostly shits of the worst order. You wouldn't want one living next door to you. Think about it: Vincent Van Gogh living next door, coming over to borrow your ear and a cup of sugar every morning--Good God!
--Stan Brakhage

I always thought if you really want to be a good actor, you've got to be able to fart in public. That, to me, is the most important. If you are so inhibited that you can't fart, I don't mean around your friends, I mean just a fart, out loud somewhere. I don't mean the 'silent creeper', everybody does that. I mean fart out loud! Just that you can do it and not be afraid of it. Humility is very important.
--Timothy Carey

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. But we can't have both.
--Louis Brandeis

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
--E.B. White

When I feed the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, I'm called a communist.
--Dom Helder Camara

Q: If music was banned tomorrow, what would you do?
Joe McPhee: I’d be the worst terrorist the world has ever known. It wouldn’t be pleasant; it wouldn’t be nice, let me tell you that.

You know, the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damn greedy.
--Herbert Hoover

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
--Henry David Thoreau

Churches have given us great treasures [such as music and architecture]. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
--Daniel C. Dennett

Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India’s richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India’s poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?
--Arundhati Roy

I would think that sound and light are probably the only elements that -- regardless of what race you are or what your intellect is or what your handicap -- those two things, you can use equally as good as anyone else. I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it. So I think that those elements -- light and sound -- are beyond democratic. They're into the creative part of life.
--Ornette Coleman

In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism.
--Rainer Werner Fassbinder

If we are to have world peace, we should have an understanding of all the idioms of beauty because the members of humanity who have created these idioms of beauty are going to be a part of us.
--Mark Tobey, 1949