Saul Williams Quotes

Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that's been a place of hope.

I think we are constantly faced with the same decision. The decision to be blindly obedient to authority versus the decision to try and change things by fighting the powers that be is always, throughout history, the only decision.

Every generation has someone who steps outside the norm and offers a voice for the unspeakable attitudes of that time. I represent everything that's supposed to be wrong, everything that's forbidden.

Any pigeonhole is something to be rebelled against.

It is human nature to instinctively rebel at obscurity or ordinariness.

You're made aware of what the industry is and what you need to conform to; I don't fit that, and I'm never going to.

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

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.

When there is a huge force pressing down on freedoms, sub-cultures with more creativity and power are likely to form.

I hope I don't have to buck the system. But if it requires bucking, I will do it.

I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.

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

Disparaging public opinion is ... a necessary prelude to ignoring it.

The mainstream is always under attack.

I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker.

If you want to challenge the system, don't go to bed with it.

One way to work the system is to work the system. The other way is to refuse to work it.

The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.

Think different in order to change the rules. By definition, if you don't change the rules you aren't a revolutionary, and if you don't think different, you won't change the rules.

I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient.

I didn’t write the rules. Why would I follow them?

If You Want To Rebel Against Society, Don’t Dull The Blade

On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.

I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.

In a certain way, my work had set me up to be against lots of things. If there wasn't some sort of sanction for it in the public world, it might have been...it wouldn't have been tolerated, because people don't want things to get shaken up.