Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its...

It’s almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns ‘privately with the administration.’ That’s just a small sliver of...

The critic said, but don’t you feel awkward about biting the hand that feeds you? I said no, I enjoy just gnawing it up to the shoulder.

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains...

Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible–it’s to dismantle those systems.

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

Superior insight into history used to be exhilarating for radicals: if we can see more clearly than the Enemy what is really going on, then we can use this knowledge to advance our values. But...

Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse.”(History Will Teach Us Nothing)

Individuals are prey to institutions in modern mass societies… Individuals can struggle mightily against institutionalized conditions, but without changing the institutions themselves, those efforts will be largely for naught, since peopletire, lose focus, forget, and,...

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution’s various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was...

Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where...

The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe...

RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in...

[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or...

He advocated that all who follow Jesus are priests, not just the official clergy. Much of what he said made sense, as did his kind manner. But why was he here now? Had this persecuted...

The ‘average sensual man’ who is sometimes unfaithful to his wife, sometimes tipsy, always a little selfish, now and then (within the law) a trifle sharp in his deals, is certainly, by ordinary standards, a...

More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say...

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

One of the most radical and revolutionary things you can do is grow your own food and eat from the land.

Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.

Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books.

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.

Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,Could never be friendly ourselves.

I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers’ revolution and a complete overhaul of society was a tiny bit more exciting than getting a...

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the...

Every Christian should be both conservative and radical; conservative in preserving the faith and radical in applying it.

Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men...

Hvis du tar til orde for at Europa en gang skal bli fritt for muslimer, tar du samtidig til orde, i beste fall, for en tvangsdeportering av mer enn femti millioner mennesker vekk fra det...

unrealistic”; any suggestion for changing the status quo, no matter how slight, can always be considered by someone as too radical, so that the only thoroughgoing escape from the charge of impracticality is never to...

Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the ‘last days’ before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they...

Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind … when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal...

Now I’ve been criticized for advocating that people push their boundaries because sometimes people get caught. Sometimes people get fired. Sometimes people lose their jobs because of pushing the boundaries too far, but it’s an...

Each generation … rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as ‘the lunatic fringe.