Oscar Zeta Acosta Quotes

I heard the opening bar of 'Help' as I headed down Polk Street. Every single time I've heard that tune I've taken it as some message from God, a warning of things to come, a perfect description of my mashed-potato character

LA VIDA NO ES LA QUE VIVIMOS. LA VIDA ES EL HONOR Y EL RECUERDO. POR ESO MAS VALE MORIR CON EL PUEBLO VIVO, Y NO VIVIR CON EL PUEBLO MUERTO. Life is not as it seems, Life is pride and personal history. Thus it is better that one die and that the people should live, rahter than one live and the people should die. ~Lopitos

What most people don’t understand about lawyers is that they’re all scared shitless to actually fight with one another.

And the truth of the matter is that death is a mystery to me. I have no opinion on the subject.

A hippie is like a cockroach. So are the beatniks. So are the Chicanos. We’re all around, Judge. And judges do not pick us to serve on Grand Juries

And when he roared into your driveway at night, you knew he was bringing music, whether you wanted it or not.

high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die.… Hunter

Firewater brings out the real brownness of this buffalo.

I have no desire to be a politician. I don’t want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century there comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao and Martin are examples. Who’s to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine and Juarez. Perhaps that is why I’ve been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique? For months, for years, no, all my life I sought to find out who I am. Why do you think I became a Baptist? Why did I try to force myself into the Riverbank Swimming Pool? And did I become a lawyer just to prove to the publishers I could do something worthwhile? Any idiot that sees only the obvious is blind. For God sake, I have never seen and I have never felt inferior to any man or beast.

Since I was about ten years younger than this crew of alcoholics, I just listened and filled their cups with cheap wine. After they’d had enough, I’d tell them of my escapades in Riverbank and in Panama where I’d worked with the Southern Baptist Convention and Jesus Christ to save the black souls of niggers, spics and Indians. I used to keep my eye on Harris when I told my stories. He had this nasty habit of pulling out a little notebook in the middle of a conversation and jotting down, as he said, “story ideas.” Later on, after I’d transferred to S.F. State and taken his writing course, he asked me if I wanted to read his first draft of Wake Up, Stupid! I kept it for a week and returned it to him at the next short story seminar. I only read the first paragraph. After that, I was no longer afraid of the intellectuals. I knew I could tell a better story.

In the summer of ’67, as a buffalo on the run,

the man was never comfortable unless he was in the company of people who were crazier than he was.

Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach—

standing tall on his own hind legs in the cockpit of a fifty-foot black cigarette boat with a silver Uzi in one hand and a magnum of smack in the other, always running ninety miles an hour with no lights and howling Old Testament gibberish at the top of his bleeding lungs.…

Wisdom should be freely available to all men without smart-alecky impediments

Ginsberg and those coffee houses with hungry-looking guitar players never did mean shit to me. They never took their drinking seriously.

Do they realize who I am? Don’t you know I can eat the God-damned hottest fucking hot sauce in the world.

shit, I’ll show these fuckers! We’ll see who can take fucking drugs. Do they realize who I am? Don’t you know I can eat the God-damned hottest fucking hot sauce in the world.

We drove it to the panhandle to listen to Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead in the first round of those Love-Ins the hippies had in the late 60’s.

The only action on the street was booze and hot cunt.

They were both good friends and heavy drinkers, a combination hard to beat.

All around us, insurance companies with patriotic names are housed in gigantic towers of white plaster. Here prestigious law firms perform their business for rich people who live next to jaded movie stars

We were at the home base of the holy man who encouraged presidents to drop bombs on poor Cockroaches in far-off villages in Vietnam

All through schools, jobs, and bumming, I haven’t even held the hand of a Mexican woman, excepting whores who are all the same anyhow

…my new name, Buffalo Zeta Brown. General Zeta was the hero of an old movie classic…A combination of Zapata and Villa and Maria Felix as the femme fatale

The broads are fantastic…the bulging breasts of these savage wenches who move with graceful twists. Since I have come to L.A. I have not touched a woman of my own culture. I swallow my milk and feel my pants bursting with heat

Seven fine broads are at his side. They sing songs of the Mexican Revolution which they learned from their grandmothers

Here a young girl in high heels wears a bikini, a blue bikini, with blonde hair. Standing next to her is a girl as young as Rosalie, in a mini-skirt and a strap over her little red nipples

It seemed that twenty-five thousand Chicanos had marched down Whittier Boulevard. But what had started as a protest against the burning of peasants in Vietnam turned into a massive public declaration by fire of their own existence