Odin Pádraig Ó Fathaigh > Odin's Quotes

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”
― Assata Shakur

“The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“You died.
I cried.
And kept on getting up.
A little slower.
And a lot more deadly.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“The schools we go to are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Schools in amerika are interested in brainwashing people with amerikanism, giving them a little bit of education, and training them in skills needed to fill the positions the capitalist system requires. As long as we expect amerika's schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless, robots who protect them and their property.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.

And i believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided him
to port.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“All you have to do is ask yourselves, who controls the government? And who are the victims of that control?”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“People are tried and convicted in the newspapers and on television before they ever see a courtroom.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“What will happen to us?" I asked. "There will always be us," he answered.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.”
― Patti Smith

“I don't think," he insisted. "I feel.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,
that Joplin had the last drunken throat,
that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.”
― Patti Smith

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“A malign star kept him.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God