William Irwin Thompson Quotes

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.

“I would rather err with the majority than in my own way.” So thought Saint Augustine. I am of the reverse opinion.

And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm.

Radicalism is as British as tea and cakes, as much a part of our make-up as monarchy and football. It will never have its own jubilees, palaces or honours system.

People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.

We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists.

If America don't come around, we're gonna' burn it down.

To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

I'm becoming more and more apolitical - I think the most revolutionary thing you can do is just live your life and have a good time. Before they scoop you up on the street or you die.

Progressive change in this country has never come from above.

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

The revolution will stop at nothing. We have changed the nature of politics.

I shall continue to be an impossible person so long as those who are now possible remain possible.

I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.

A revolutionary should neither look nor act like one to get ahead in Canada.

The French higher education system has not adapted to this revolutionary period. [It] rewards people for their capacity to follow the path that is open to them. It does not encourage people to rebel or to develop their character.

In revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success.

If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.

We think that a powerful and vigorous movement is impossible without differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery.

Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.

When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me.