Lester Bangs Quotes

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

I mean, there's a hell of a lot of grounds for protest, but you don't do it through music.

Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - is innately disruptive of 'business as usual.' That is why it is effective.

We are on the threshold of a significant breakthrough, and the greatest weapon is the mass demonstration.

We were marching since we were babies and all we did was make Jane Fonda famous.

After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the 'sense of utter irresponsibility' shown by the demonstrators.

Any protester knows that the only way activism works is to get the people on your side.

It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something.

At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this. It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations.

What if you threw a protest and no one showed up? The lack of angst and anger and emotion is a big positive.

I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.

Occupy Wall Street is a real movement.

My parents demonstrated against the Vietnam war, they were into the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, they started the first vegetarian restaurant in Pittsburgh.

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.

It's very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.

Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common: They are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause.

I was very active in the peace movement, still am.

Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War.

I have watched Occupy Wall Street mostly from the sidelines.

I was so upset with what was going on in the world. I just couldn't stand the idea of being people tortured and that we even had such a thing as war. I hated the older generation, who had not done anything about it. Punk was a call-to-arms for me.

To pass a big idea in this town. You almost need social unrest

Disruption of the New Left