Abbie Hoffman Quotes

The only way to support a revolution is to make your own.

Free speech is the right to shout 'theater' in a crowded fire.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning!

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.

Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.

Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they'll tell you it's to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.

Smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps.

Because I'll be more worried about who's looking at your tits in that shirt instead of Hoffman. - Travis

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

Abby Hoffman said we should all eat what we kill. That would put an end to war.

In this state, dig it, you get twenty years for sale of dope to a minor. You only get five to ten for manslaughter. So like, the thing is, if you're selling to a kid and cops come, shoot the kid real quick!

Lay off the needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.

Hep is a very dangerous disease that can cause a number of permanent conditions, including death, which is extremely permanent.

The 60’s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great.

Above all, what you have as young people that's vitally needed to make social change, is impatience. You want it to happen now. There have to be enough people that say, "We want it now, in our lifetime. " We want to see apartheid in South Africa come down right now. We want to see the war in Central America stop right now. We want the CIA off our campus right now. We want an end to sexual harassment in our communities right now. Be adventurists in the sense of being bold and daring. Be opportunists and seize this opportunity, this moment in history, to go out and save our country. It's your turn now.

Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.

Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?

A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect.

Avoid all needle drugs — the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.

He was reminded again what Abbie Hoffman had said: We must eat what we kill. That would put an end to war.

MR. WEINGLASS: Between the date of your birth, November 30, 1936, and May 1, 1960, what if anything occurred in your life? HOFFMAN: Nothing. I believe it is called an American education. -from the Chicago 7 trial

Democracy is not something you believe in or hang your hat on, but something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles and falls. If you participate, the future is yours.

A modern revolutionary group, explained Abbie Hoffman, headed for the television station, not the factory.

You're awake," he said from the window seat where he'd been sitting with Spike and a copy of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book that I happen to know he'd stolen from my mother's bookshelf downstairs.

There are a lot of different realities going around these days,” Abbie Hoffman once said. Evolutionary acceleration is forcing us to the point where each will have to take responsibility for which reality we accept.

I've had some good times, had some bad. Took some lumps. Scored some points. Half-way through life, at 43, I still say, 'go for broke.' No government, no FBI, no judge, no jailer is ever gonna make me say 'uncle.' Now, as then, let the game continue. I bet my stake on freedom's call; I'll play these cards with no regrets.

They told me that "with age comes wisdom", but all I got was hemorrhoids." - Lecture tour for "Steal This Urine Test

remember Abbie Hoffman? He was the guy who tried to “levitate” the Pentagon off its foundations; he was quite a clown. He was the guy who created the Youth International Party, the “Yippies”; he was very active in antiwar protests, while at the same time he conceived of a meaningful revolution as roughly anything that conveyed irreverence with comedy and vulgarity.

barreling toward that dormant We-They place, a place deep inside that quietly

Over the summer, I'd shot up to 6'3", but still weighed in at only 130 pounds. I was a smart, physically frail kid, itching for a fight.   I

After devouring Steal This Book, I'd undertaken a frantic search for more Abbie material, eventually acquiring a near-complete collection: Revolution for the Hell of It, Woodstock Nation, To america With Love, VOTE! I'd begun to understand

Revolution" were meaningless concepts to kids free to dance the night away in teen Discotheques

But Yippie was already a gleam in Abbie Hoffman’s eye; some hard SDS theoreticians were already smoking a joint now and then with the dopers, hoping to become closer to them and gradually lead them into the correct Marxist paths; and the potheads who were busted and spent some time in jail tended to come out with more willingness to listen to radical agitprop, especially if it had a strong anti-cop bias to it. The Black Panther Party’s polemical panchreston, “pig,” was even beginning to appear in some white vocabularies. And then, Eldridge Cleaver, who was a god in those days, announced that although heroin was rejected by the Panthers, they had no objection to marijuana.

Julius, You radicalized more young people than we ever could. You're the country's top Yippie.

The shoe thing at the airports and Code Orange and so on are world-class practical jokes, all right. But my all-time favorite is one the holy, anti-war clown Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) pulled off during the Vietnam War. He announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not. Or so we hoped.

Among non-Jewish Jews there have been some who, in addition to their alienation from Jewish roots, have not felt rooted in the non-Jewish society in which they lived. During the last century, some of these Jews have contributed to intense Jew-hatred. These are radical and revolutionary Jews. The reasons for the antisemitism they engender are unique. First, their challenges to non-Jews do not come from within Judaism. Second, they not only challenge the non-Jews’ values, but the non-Jews’ national and religious identity as well. Third, they are as opposed to Jews’ values and identity as to non-Jews’. Nevertheless, and unfortunately for other Jews, the behavior of these radical non-Jewish Jews is identified as Jewish. The association of Jews with revolutionary doctrines and social upheaval has not, unfortunately, been the product of antisemites’ imaginations. Marx, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rosa Luxemburg, Béla Kun, Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin,William Kunstler, Norman G. Finkelstein, and Noam Chomsky are among the better known.2 The phenomenon of the highly disproportionate role played by Jews in radical causes often has been commented upon. As the social psychologist Ernest van den Haag noted, “although very few Jews are radicals, very many radicals are Jews: out of one hundred Jews five may be radicals, but out of ten radicals five are likely to be Jewish. Thus it is incorrect to say that a very great number of Jews are radicals but quite correct to say that a disproportionate number of radicals are Jews. This was so in the past, and it has not changed.”3 How are these Jewish radicals made and why do they cause antisemitism? The making of a Jewish radical is a complex social and psychological process but its essential elements can be discerned. First, these individuals have inherited a tradition of thousands of years of Jews challenging others’ values—though of course in the name of Judaism and ethical monotheism rather than radical secular ideologies. Non-Jewish Jews do not base their radical doctrines on the Jewish tradition; indeed, they usually denigrate it, but the tradition’s impact could not be avoided, only transformed.4 Second, radical non-Jewish Jews are rootless in that they do not feel rooted in either the Gentiles’ or the Jews’ religion or nation. They may very well have become revolutionaries precisely to overcome this root-lessness or alienation. Because they refuse to become like the non-Jews by identifying with the non-Jews’ religious or national identities, they seek to have non-Jews (and Jews) become like them, alienated from all religious or national identities. Only then, these revolutionaries believe, will they cease to feel alienated.

Sometimes the proper intellectual argument is "FUCK YOU!

The events in Vietnam and the protests against the draft, led by college students, increased the growing influence of the youth culture, who made Vonnegut their literary hero in questioning the accepted wisdom of the status quo. Kurt was as surprised as anyone and had never wanted to be a “spokesman” of the young. He was very leery of the hippie phenomenon and wrote a searing account of one of their heroes, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles and assorted movie stars (“Yes, We Have No Nirvanas,” published in Esquire and collected in his book Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons). He satirized the stylish popularity of Eastern meditation, saying we had the same thing in the West—reading short stories, which also lowered your heart rate and freed your mind from other concerns. He said short stories were “Buddhist catnaps.” He thought the Maharishi was a phony but he loved the music of the Beatles, spoke up for Abbie Hoffman, and admired Allen Ginsberg. When