Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young Quotes

“How do you take responsibility for yourself and your family, and at the same time take some responsibility for the larger world? And that’s difficult. Or not so much that it’s difficult—it’s a contradiction. And living within that contradiction is never easy.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“The political legacy of the 1960s, in other words, was not just civil rights, feminism, gay rights, and the youth counterculture. The equal and opposite reaction—the backlash—was the institutionalization of white resentment and authoritarian lawbreaking in the modern-day Republican Party.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“The United States government is not invincible. It didn’t exist for all time and it’s not going to exist for all time. And that lesson is a very powerful lesson. That lesson is an explosive lesson.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“you have to understand, we saw something like a flash of light—the kind of insight of a single bright lightbulb in a dark room—the insight that everything about our country, everything about our culture, everything about our politics: it’s all about race. Wherever you start, you’ll find race.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“To her, all this is still covered by the code of secrecy. “Sharing resources was important,” she acknowledged, “but I’m not going to go farther than that. They [the Black underground] did their own thing. We just kept asking how we could be of help.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“When Black people went underground,” Jamal told me, “it was that white underground that would help find hiding places, money, food, help them get out the country, et cetera. That became our modern Underground Railroad, to be like, real clear.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“The Weathermen were able to elude the FBI manhunt simply because they blended in easily with the radicalized and disaffected youth culture of the time.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“this, it turns out, is one of the great secrets and insights of the underground—the fact that there’s not one underground, but many. Over the years, my parents crossed paths with multiple subcultures of fugitives: pot growers on communes in Oregon, a cell of the Irish Republican Army working out of New York, an international underground of palenques stretching from Cuba to Algiers,”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all. —Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“also think there’s something good about being in the crowd, about being comrades, shoulder to shoulder with others. And I think there’s also something absolutely destructive about it.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“Being part of a crowd permits, even requires, a fundamental abandonment of the self: a submerging of one’s personal tastes, ideas, and ego into a larger movement.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“Beware of the crowd,” Bill used to tell us when we were teenagers. “The crowd lets you be brave in a way that you couldn’t be brave on your own. But it will also allow you to do things—hurt women or insult people—that you would never do alone.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“this government is only good to rich people,”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“Whenever white people have a choice, you can’t make that choice without thinking about how easy it is to not stand up for Black people at a given moment. I never felt like I wasn’t choosing women, but I felt the essential American dilemma is white people standing up, not once, but consistently over time, against the apparatus of Black slavery.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“When our protest against the war failed, they decided to bring the war home.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“can be as simple as a widening of one’s circle of empathy.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“How will you live your life so that it doesn’t make a mockery of your values?”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“The first revolution is when you change your mind. —Gil Scott-Heron”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence,” Bernardine told a crowd of SDS members that month, “in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created!”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“She embodied a rage and defiance that spoke to the mood of the moment.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“confining, contradictory quality throughout her life—attracting male attention while simultaneously allowing men to dismiss her as unworthy of notice; emphasizing her symbolic, aesthetic appeal while minimizing the substance of what she had to say. She found it frustrating. And infuriating. And still does.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“thinks it’s narcissistic and unseemly to reduce the larger movement for racial justice to a single person’s choices, to turn a mass struggle into a personal psychodrama.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“Not all idealists become revolutionaries, and there’s more than one way to change the world.”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“Give me four years to teach the children”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

“It’s the well-behaved children who make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands”
― Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground