Jack Bowman Quotes

Good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system.

The public school system doesn't get everybody. Every generation has its rebels.

No one can go on being a rebel too long without becoming an autocrat.

The French higher education system has not adapted to this revolutionary period. [It] rewards people for their capacity to follow the path that is open to them. It does not encourage people to rebel or to develop their character.

I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it.

Every generation tries to put its doctrine on a high shelf where the children can not reach it.

Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

By education most have been misled; So they believe, because they were bred. The priest continues where the nurse began, And thus the child imposes on the man.

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

I knew what normalcy was, and I wasn't having it.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.

We did it just because it was forbidden.

I shall continue to be an impossible person so long as those who are now possible remain possible.

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

There are .. two choices: obedience to institutional authority or radical dissent from it.

Rebellion is always going to fascinate, as it's always packaged in a very safe way.

The mainstream is always under attack.

From childhood, we're trained to be a certain way, to behave a certain way - so that the power base can control us, really. And punk and drag are completely outside of that.