Max McNabb > Max's Quotes

“The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They have got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.”
― Bob Dylan

“DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you're about WILL COME TRUE. It's a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It's best to keep that all inside.”
― Bob Dylan, The Bob Dylan Scrapbook: 1956-1966

“She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“If you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there's no success like failure”
― Bob Dylan

“To live outside the law you must be honest.”
― Bob Dylan

“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.”
― Bob Dylan

“Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you'd like to act.”
― Bob Dylan

“songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“Democracy don't rule the world, You'd better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence,
But I guess that's better left unsaid.”
― Bob Dylan (Lyric)

“This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.”
― Bob Dylan

“The sun's not yellow, its chicken!”
― Bob Dylan

“And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns... that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale... that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorientate myself. p.71”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.”
― Bob Dylan

“[In 1951] we were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It's one thing to be afraid when someone's holding a shotgun on you, but it's another thing to be afraid of something that's just not quite real.”
― Bob Dylan

“A lot of people don't have much food on their table. But they got a lot of forks 'n knives. And they got to cut somethin'.”
― Bob Dylan

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
― Ezra Pound

“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.”
― Ezra Pound

“I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.”
― Ezra Pound

“In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.”
― Ezra Pound

“The eyes of this dead lady speak to me
For here was love, was not to be drowned out.
And here desire, not to be kissed away.

The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.”
― Ezra Pound

“where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.”
― Ezra Pound, The Cantos

“What thou lovest well remains. The rest is dross.”
― Ezra Pound

“A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.”
― Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir

“Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons.”
― Ron Paul

“It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.”
― Ron Paul, End the Fed

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices First Series

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”
― H. L. Mencken

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable...”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series