Sam Kinison Quotes

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.

In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.

Any pigeonhole is something to be rebelled against.

I think my father had a lot of anti-establishment in him. He came through the '60s.

We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage. Jesus and the early Christians had a marvelous political imagination. They turned all the presumptions and ideas of power and blessing upside down.

I think that everybody would love to play the bad girl, 'cause for most of us, it's a stretch.

When I first read 'On the Road,' it helped me figure out how to live against the grain. Now I wonder how to be subversive when the subversive has become mainstream.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats.

From an early age I didn't buy into the value systems of working hard in a nine-to-five job. I thought creativity, friendship and loyalty and pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable was much more interesting.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

I love being the bad guy, simply because I was always so responsible, so predictable growing up.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

The thread of culture that runs through the entire history of punk is also a dedication to challenging the authoritarian.

Punk recognised the fact that the establishment had no room. There's no point in saying you've got the establishment wrong because they hadn't got the establishment wrong, they'd got it absolutely dead on.

Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.

The reason why I am proud of my part in the punk movement is that I think it really did implant a message that was already there. The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government.

Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.

Be skeptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests.

So many big magazines just dissed the whole punk thing as nothing, but really, it was a big thing. It really changed, and that's what we wanted to do - change the system.

The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.

The mainstream is always under attack.

It was a tedious saying among hippies: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. I was very much part of the problem.

What we didn't realize then - and one of the many things Timothy Leary was wrong about - is that when you drop out, you inevitably also drop in.