Stanislaw Jerzy Lec Quotes

The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.

Remember that those who fought and bled for your liberties were in their time considered as being against the law, as dangerous disturbers and trouble-makers. They not only preached violence, but they carried out their ideas …. They said that "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God." They wrote a dangerous document called the Declaration of Independence. A document which continues to be dangerous to this day, and for the circulation of which a young man was sentenced to ninety days prison in a New York Court, only the other day. They were the Anarchists of their time--they were never within the law.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Young kids who are out there who are upset and angry, they can watch this and realize that you can speak out through your pen and not just with rage and anger, and challenge the people who are telling you things that you don't like to hear, like 'Hamilton' did.

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

The greatest changes in history have come when people were able to shake off what others told them to do.

If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.

You have typewriters, presses. And a huge audience. How about raising hell?

Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.

Christianity in its true sense puts an end to the State. It was so understood from its very beginning, and for that Christ was crucified.

I definitely didn't fit in perfectly to the school system. I was raised with such freedom of speech and thinking.

A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called "the Kingdom of Heaven" had been put out of the way; and I can imagine that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, "it will all blow over now." Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for centuries yet.

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.

Freedom of the press and also of speech, assembly, and worship can persist as social forms and legal guarantees, while at the same time their functional realities can be gradually slipping away.

I hate to tell people what they should think 'cause I really have an aversion when people tell me what to think.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

You'd have to give people free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more.

History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it

We need our radicals.

True revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. "To establish Anarchy." "Anarchy will be instituted." But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require protection from governmental power, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.

There is a need, especially right now in America, to be a bit provocative.

Some feel that you lose your independence if you don't let your mind just wander where it wants to, if you try to control it. But that is not the case. If your mind is proceeding in the correct way, one already has the correct opinion. But if your mind is proceeding in an incorrect way, then it's necessary, definitely, to exercise control.