Jim Goad Quotes

If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.

I've always straddled a weird line - there's a lot of mainstream stuff that I love. At the same, I still feel like an outsider. I'm the outsider who's on the inside.

I have toyed with the idea of playing it straight. But, like I say, I really believe we are all out of our minds at some level.

Conformists die, but heretics live forever.

It's basically against the whole idea of what always made rock&roll music interesting to me. I thought it was an unassailable outlet for some pure and natural expressions of rebellion. It was one channel you could take without havin' to kiss ass, you know? And right now it just seems like they're on a big daisy chain, each kissin' each other's asses.

There are so many things we've been brought up to believe that it takes you an awfully long time to realize that they aren't you.

People didn't relate to me as being Chinese or white, just being a hippie, a long-haired hippie.

I believe that we are a story-driven species and that we understand how things are put together, in the context of narrative. It's a shame that science hasn't been taught that way, in a long time. It's usually the fact completely devoid of any human experience or any idea of how the scientist came to that conclusion.

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.

To the extent that I can still believe in Bohemia, which I think is very important to me in some way that I don't yet really understand, to the extent that I still believe in that, I have to believe that there are viable degrees of freedom inherent if not realized in interstitial areas.

All isolation is wrong so say the herd. And long didst thou belong to the herd.

I hate the idea of always having to interpret other people's ideas and thoughts and words, because I'm very independent and, I guess, a free thinker.

A Name Is A Label, And As Soon As There Is A Label, The Ideas Disappear And Out Comes Label-Worship And Label-Bashing, And Instead Of Living By A Theme Of Ideas, People Begin Dying For Labels... And The Last Thing The World Needs Is Another Religion.

That's how the scientists discover new science. They start out with a hypothesis--an idea--and then others believe enough in the idea that they make it true. You see?

The charge that an idea is radical, impractical, or long- haired is met by showing that a prominent businessman has favored it?an additional tactic in this strategy of defense?is to assert that Winston Churchill once sponsored the particular idea. If one is challenged, a sufficiently careful investigation will show that he did.

Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.

In this modern day and age, we have instant coffee, instant tea - instant disbelief. That's the reason we will never become anything. It is because we will never believe in ourselves. We will always listen to the mass majority. If everybody's making fun of you and criticizing you, then you know you're on the right track. 'Cause most people ain't got it.

Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesuswould absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.

You have the establishment and then you have the hippies revolting against the establishment, and what you end up getting are like accountants with long hair. And that's kind of what happened with the youth movement in the '70s.

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

The world is kept alive only by heretics.

I noticed a long time ago that the Universe rewards belief systems. It doesn't really matter what you believe - it'll be there and waiting for you if you go and look for it. Decide the universe is, say, run by secret enormous teddy bears, and I can guarantee you'll immediately start running across evidence that this is true.

They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.