Jello Biafra Quotes

When the students were killed at Kent State, the cast voted to do a demonstration from the stage, and I abstained.

These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads walking round.

I remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was up early watching television and watched the announcement. I didn't understand what the word 'assassinated' meant.

My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.

There is a natural right to complain about abusive rulers — to “put their neighbors upon their guard against the craft or even ­violence of men in ­authority.

I feel so proud to see young people standing up against the injustice to stand up and say that "All lives matter." They're following in the footsteps of those who came before them.

News footage came on the TV during dinner of bloody bodies coming back from battle in Vietnam, or the race riots in the South, people getting hosed in Selma, Alabama, or the Biafra war, where I got my name. In my household, it was explained and discussed with the children, as a way of educating us from when we first started grade school why racism and war were wrong, what this all really means.

We, the Desaparecidos, are perfectly prepared for people to hate what we're saying or not like what we're saying.

Who is it that said that 'you have not converted a man because you have silenced him?' This is true of the use of the military on people.

It is dissent from government policies which defines the true Patriot

We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past ... while we silence the rebels of the present.

At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority.

You see Martin Luther King is dead and Huey Newton is not. And Malcolm X is dead and Bobby Seale is not. And Vernon Jordan was shot. The thing that revolutionaries, or even people who want to claim they're revolutionaries, often forget is that it doesn't make no difference what kind of wardrobe you wear, and if you speak up about Black people doing better you just risked your life.

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.

In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged.

I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic, and we should stand up and say, "We are Americans and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration!"

They call me "a teacher, a fomenter of violence." I would say point blank, "That is a lie. I'm not for wanton violence, I'm for justice."

It was young people who stubbornly insisted on justice, stubbornly refused to accept the world as it is that transformed not just the country but transformed the world.

I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.

Mass-murderers are simply people who have had ENOUGH.

I was more than anything a radical. I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence. But I really just wanted to be left alone. I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence.

Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me.

Why is it when we have 10 million people in this country who say 'No', we still have a president who says 'Yes.' In a democracy, something's wrong here.

Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.