Fredy Perlman Quotes

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.

I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

The only thing that's going to free Huey is gun powder.

An oppressed people will always rise.

My fellow revolutionaries, liberation is a noble cause. We must fight to obtain it.

The revolt against any oppression usually goes to an opposite extreme for a time; and that is right and necessary.

Revolution is the right of slaves.

Be committed to … smashing feudalists, conservatives, and imperialists who are "reactionaries".

It is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

When people rise, they must have a goal worthy of them. Must paltry goods be of concern to them?... The people must rise up not to collect sugar, but to bring down the tyrants.

You can Jail a Revolutionary but you can't jail the Revolution. You can run a freedom fighter around the country, but you can't run freedom fighting around the country. You can murder a liberator, but you can't murder liberation.

Every revolution, bloody or not, has two phases. The first phase is defined by the struggle for freedom, the second by the struggle for power and revenge on the votaries of the ancien regime.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.

Despair and frustration will not shake our belief that the resistance is the only way of liberation.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

I think there is an instinct out there to rid us of our masters.

The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

Fight the power that be. Fight the power.

Human beings want to be free and however long they may agree to stay locked up, to stay oppressed, there will come a time when they say 'That's it.' Suddenly they find themselves doing something that they never would have thought they would be doing, simply because of the human instinct that makes them turn their face towards freedom.

I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.