Marilyn Manson Quotes

My individual power is limited. I want to use my high-profile way to wake people up to take action together to do good things. I can only awake them with my performance art and creativity.

I have a feeling that demonstrations don't accomplish anything. That they become fads. I also feel that demonstrations wouldn't go on unless there is a TV camera. That part of it all is performance for the media. I didn't know whether they are completely honest.

I love the protests. And if you think about it, what better way to send a message to Wall Street than by sitting in a pup tent banging on a drum.

Social media and young people, art, music, all communications make this one of the most active times for activism. It will be a time of change.

Every day you meet a delegation going to some convention to try and change the way of somebody else's life.

I think my role is as a writer, especially, and then also as a speaker, an organizer, and an entre- preneur of social change. My role isn't to make choices for people-each individual or group needs to do that on their own. But as a writer and a speaker, you can describe possibilities that perhaps haven't been visible before, and aren't in other public dialogues or in the rest of the media. So I suppose I think of myself mainly as an organizer and as someone who describes possibilities.

People who have come of age from the '80s on have experienced a form of activism that's very sterile and annoying. It's not that much fun to be an activist. That's partly by design. They are sterile protests and anonymous e-mail activism - not the kind of thing where people fall in love, form friendships for life, and see the change they make right in front of them. I've seen that, when people start to experience doing these things together and the power that it has.

Social media itself is not protest. To tweet is not to protest physically. To do a Facebook post, and though it's critical and crucial, is not to show up and embody the anger you feel, to embody the righteous outrage you feel, to embody the concern you feel. This is about putting feet to pavement and to register in the consciousness of America that this is something that's problematic.

I don't accept armed struggle. Maybe it was the way in the '50s and '60s, but we want a democratic revolution.

Perhaps we have to remember that there are forms of outrage that do not lead to any sort of mobilization, and there are ways of "registering the facts" that do not lead to outrage.

I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.

I have always been inspired by the American peace movement because it is operating in a very hard and militarist environment.

I used to believe that we could change the media. I was as naive as anybody.

All good niggers, all the niggers who change the world, die in violence. They don't die in regular ways.

Rock-and-roll was an example of change in the body of the culture. I think it's really what helped bring the anti-war movement to its peak and moved people into the streets to seize the day - the movement was the embodiment of what was happening in the music. This is what taught me that it was possible to bring art and activism together. Without that piece, that energetic embodiment piece, the rest is just intellectual construct.

You will not be able to stay home, brother./You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out./You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,/Skip out for beer during commercials,/Because the revolution will not be televised.

It is in the American tradition to stand up for one's rights--even if the new way to stand up for one's rights is to sit down.

To those who had ordered them to death, one of them said: “We die because the people are asleep and you will die because the people will awaken.”

The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution.

Let me tell you humans something. You are not fighters. You don’t have what it takes to actually change your current living situations. You can’t even organize a decent group to combat oppression. How can beings of such low stature hope to do anything? You are not heroes. Stop pretending you are helping by playing commando and get out of the way of someone who can.

Just media alone is not enough. You have to have organization.

We need to take on the new media, and in terms of power and public pedagogy, we need to organize a whole range of people outside of the academy.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.