Wadada Leo Smith Quotes

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.

I would be with those who say the hierarchy in the United States has badly mishandled this whole situation.

I think we're living in a world where society is very difficult.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle, you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.

We are very fortunate to live in this country, but at the same time, the reason the forces are so much more destructive here is because they are faceless.

I don't want to be limited or ghettoized in any way.

What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?

We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on.

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

Man is everywhere still in chains.

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal.

We are unable to recognize the laws of necessity if we believe we are free

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold onto the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own system of repression.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!

We live in a classist, racist, homophobic society into which we are very assimilated, that's all. I'm not really proud about that.

In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.