Frank Zappa Quotes

I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.

The world that has made us can no longer contain us

We've always had anti-Americans. We've always had left-wing protesters and so forth, but they were always off to the left kooks. They were always oddball nutcases. Now they're not. They come across as ordinary, everyday mainstream people. It just disgusts me. It's so unfortunate, so unnecessary.

People used to throw rocks at me for my clothes, now they wanna know where I buy them.

But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort — and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.

It turns out a lot of people don't get it. Wikipedia is like rock'n'roll; it's a cultural shift.

Things are shifting; man is evolving in many different ways. The Internet has created a portal for people to connect with each other in a way they never could have before. When it comes to African-American or black films, it's different because there is a model that you can actually look at, an equation that shows that these films earn money.

When we talked about Socrates, we saw how dangerous it could be to appeal to people's reason. With Jesus we see how dangerous it can be to demand unconditional forgiveness. Even in the world of today, we can see how mighty powers can come apart at the seams when confronted with simple demands for peace, love, food for the poor, and amnesty for the enemies of the state.

If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

Revolution looks at the intersection ahead and pushes people to do the right thing.

Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won't approach them. But it's difficult to know where to start; we've all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I have become more real, I've grown away from most working-class people.

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

What I'm trying to do is to influence all the people I can influence. All those who are still under the dream and just put a big question mark in their mind. The acid dream is over, that is what I'm trying to tell them.

When people decide they want to be free, there is nothing that can stop them.

I would like to believe that people knew what they were fighting for and why they wanted a revolution, and exactly what it was within that they didn't like.

Revolutions usually start with enthusiasm and end in tears.

We don't have a revolution, and we don't have the time for evolution, where does it come from? It must come from some kind of shared experience that everybody agrees with.

Let the "socialist" snivellers croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes so as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can fail to notice that all over the world the birth pangs of the old, capitalist society, which is pregnant with socialism, have begun.

Some say society must change in order to change people. No, people must be changed in order to change society.

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.

It is terrifying to people when women step up and start owning the story that they have not owned. And I'm seeing so much of this, and it is a seismic shift.

If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.