189 Censorship Quotes

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

All dese governments and dis this and that, these people that say they're here to help, why them say you cannot smoke the herb? Herb... herb is a plant, you know? And when me check it, me can't find no reason. All them say is, 'it make you rebel'. Against what?

All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.

Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.

At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language?

Judge and prosecutor had hammered it home that Lady Chatterly was an immoral woman, that she had had sexual relations before marriage, that she had committed adultery under her husband's roof; as if these charges somehow disqualified her from participation in serious literature. Indeed, there were long periods of the trial during which an outsider might well have assumed that a divorce case was being heard.

My position has always been that there's two types of people opposed to pornography: those who don't know what they're talking about, and those who don't know what they're missing.

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

Oops, I thought. Oops is an all-purpose word standing for every bit of profanity, blasphemy, and pornographic and scatological execration I could think of.

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm in them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.

In pulp fiction it is a rigid convention that the hero's shoulders and the heroine's balcon constantly threaten to burst their bonds, a possibility which keeps the audience in a state of tense expectancy. Unfortunately for the fans, however, recent tests reveal that the wisp of chiffon which stands between the publisher and the postal laws has the tensile strength of drop-forged steel.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there. And I think a lot of these young kids are going to have to learn the hard way before they realize that you can actually do some damage if you're being careless or frivolous in what you're saying.

Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).

It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

Many people are surprised to hear that we have comedians in Russia, but they are there. They are dead, but they are there.

For a country to have a great writer ... is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

A playwright lives in an occupied country: And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

In one gallery they actually had a notice which said 'No Sketching.' How obnoxious! I said, 'How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?'

I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,' and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, 'Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.'

I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'

I was taking with me the manuscript of my History of Western Philosophy, and the unfortunate censors had to read every word of it lest it should contain information useful to the enemy. They were, however, at last satisfied that a knowledge of philosophy could be of no use to the Germans, and very politely assured me that they had enjoyed reading my book, which I confess I found hard to believe.

It would be a great abuse of my position to write that it was Northwest Airlines that treated us in this shoddy and inexcusable way, so I won't.

I have a crazy quirk, Eugene. I like to say what I think. And if you're gonna work for the Jews, you can no longer say what you think. You can't say the holocaust never happened, for example. That is an absolute no-no. You can't say that circumcision is a crime. There are so many things you cannot say once you get on the Jewish bandwagon. ... There used to be a lot of people like me, but little by little the Jewish spirit seems to be conquering all.

'A black person would never dream of talkin to the police high; thats a waste of weed.'

[MTV] won't play A Tout Le Monde because we made a video for that and they're saying that if people see it, that they'll kill themselves. And I'm thinking to myself, you made Kurt Cobain 'Man of the Year', and if anything, he left an indelible last message that the easy way out is to blow your fuckin' head off.

You ask if I would have been different without 'Party guidance'? Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage.

Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self-reliant enough to be free. Such things did not need as much emphasis a generation ago, but when the clock of civilization can be turned back by burning libraries, by exiling scientists, artists, musicians, writers and teachers; by disbursing universities, and by censoring news and literature and art; an added burden, an added burden is placed on those countries where the courts of free thought and free learning still burn bright. If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation.

Forbidden to write anything critical of the Fascist regime, they could only report what the hierarchy wanted them to report. The clever and honest American and British journalists, however, did insinuate startling facts in their stories; these insinuations, unfortunately, were between the lines and not for those who read as they run, and the American public is mostly a running reading public.

We scent the air of the office. We realize that certain things are wanted, certain things unwanted. There is an atmosphere favorable to Fascism. We find that out when some little pro-Mussolini item is played up, some big item, not so pleasant to the hero of our era, played down, or left out. In the future we send pro-Mussolini stuff only. We get a cable of congratulations.

But much more vicious than these cases is the majority of foreign correspondents who never have to be placed against the wall, who are never told what to write and how to write it, but who know from contact with the great minds of the press lords or from the simple deduction that the bosses are in big business and the news must be slanted accordingly, or from the general intangible atmosphere which prevails everywhere, what they can do and what they must never do. The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, 'I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like.'

Well, I'm proud of it. I was declard persona non grata not by the country but by a terrorist regime. But I know that Cubans love me and my music.

We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.

The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. . . [Censorship of the news] is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted 'Dis-information'. That is routine behavior in Wartime - for all countries and all combatants - and it makes life difficult for people who value real news.

Mostly, filmmakers complain that they must work against muddled or moving boundaries. And parents' groups grouse about 'ratings creep,' a perceived tendency for a category like PG-13 to permit ever more violence, sex and profanity over the years to reach impressionable youth. Yet it was Mr. Valenti's genius to have devised an apparatus that is not bound by precedent, changes its definitions at will and, ultimately, serves the motion picture industry by becoming, at any given moment, as permissive or restrictive as the prevailing climate seems to demand... for nearly 40 years, Mr. Valenti's raters have largely kept politicians and busybodies out of the film business, even if that meant playing somewhat unpredictable busybodies themselves. They haven't always been fair, and not entirely pleasant to deal with. But in the end, theirs was no mean achievement.

Our papers don't purtend to print on'y wut Guv'ment choose, An' thet insures us all to git the very best o' noose.

Eleven dead bodies. One dead cat. No breasts.

Sir - As a playgoer of forty years standing, may I say that I heartily agree with Peter Pinnell in his condemnation of 'Entertaining Mr Sloane'. I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion. And to be told that such a disgusting piece of filth now passes for humour! Today's young playwrights take it upon themselves to flaunt their contempt for ordinary decent people. I hope that the ordinary decent people of this country will shortly strike back! Yours truly, Edna Welthorpe (Mrs)

The three towering geniuses of European culture, Shakespeare, Mozart and Leonardo da Vinci were not allowed to appear on the euro note as they might, in their separate ways, cause offense: Mozart because he was a 'womanizer,' Shakespeare because he wrote The Merchant of Venice, a play judged to be anti-Semitic, and Leonardo because he was reported to fancy boys. Now the euro note carries a picture of a rather dull bridge.

And from Richard, one of the three pieces of mail which arrived this week, and it says 'Look out for the German all-female ensemble called Breast. Have they made any records?' Well if they have I certainly wouldn't be able to play them on the BBC, not with a name like that, because at the BBC nobody has breasts of course. But here at BFBS they look at things very differently. I've got quite a reasonable set of breasts myself actually.

I wouldn't let anybody influence me into thinking I was doing the wrong thing by singing about death, hell and drugs. Because I've always done that, and I always will.

A Gauleiter of Franconia whose occupation was to pour forth filthy writings about the Jews, but who had no idea that anybody would read them.

If the good guy gets the girl, it's rated PG; if the bad guy gets the girl, it's rated R; and if everybody gets the girl, it's rated X.

Conversely, banning this book would send a signal that the present establishment will do what it can to prevent Hinduism from rising up, from regaining self-confidence, from facing the challenge of hostile ideologies.

You take a picture of a murder, which is illegal, and you can win Picture of the Year for TIME Magazine. You take a picture of two people having sex, which is not illegal, and you can get thrown in jail.

Today, when every form of perversion except masturbation and bestiality have been shown on the screen, Hellman, Wyler and the Mirisch Co. apparently thought a re-do of The Children's Hour would sell tickets if lesbianism were not only restored as the charge the evil child falsely brings, but also condoned... There is an explicit line of dialogue which asserts that those who choose to practice lesbianism are not destroyed by it - a claim disapproved by the number of lesbians who become insane and/or commit suicide.

All the network cares about is how many times you say 'Fuck' on the air.

The criticisms were so tepid they were embarrassing. Almost nobody, including me, dared to criticize the U.S. attack on South Vietnam. That's like talking Hittite. Nobody even understood the words.

The major international campaign orchestrated against Chomsky on completely false pretexts was only part - though perhaps a crucial part - of the ambitious campaign launched in the late 70s with the hope of reconstructing the ideology of power and domination which had been partially exposed during the Indochina war. The magnitude of the insane attack against Chomsky, which aimed at silencing him and robbing him of his moral stature and his prestige and influence, is of course one more tribute to the impact of his writings and his actions - not for nothing he was the only one singled out. --Carlos P. Otero, Language and Politics, 1988 [193]

Earlier generations went to see what was forbidden in life and developed a real excitement about the movies. Today's rating system keeps kids out of the good ones. I wouldn't want them to see movies like Natural Born Killers, but my tendency is you're better off seeing things than not. That glazed indifference kids develop can be worse than over-excitement.

Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.

The R rating for this film, based on a few four-letter words, is entirely unjustified. It is an ideal film for teenagers.

Censors feel they are safe from objectionable material but must protect others who are not as smart or moral. The same impulse tempts the reviewer of 'The Believer'... If the wrong people get the wrong message - well, there has never been any shortage of wrong messages. Or wrong people.

Why did they give an R rating to a movie perfect for teenagers?

The author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Qu'ran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.

Aesopian language was used by all of us. And of course, using this language meant having readers who understood it.

Mrs. Digby told me that when she lived in London with her sister, Mrs. Brooke, they were every now and then honoured by the visits of Dr. Johnson. He called on them one day soon after the publication of his immortal dictionary. The two ladies paid him due compliments on the occasion. Amongst other topics of praise they very much commended the omission of all naughty words. 'What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?' said the moralist. The ladies, confused at being thus caught, dropped the subject of the dictionary.

(about Preston walking out) If people start turning their backs on comedy, and walking off panel shows, then the terrorists have won.

I took that horrible novel back to the library - yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. I cannot control the output of diseased minds or people who cater to them - BUT I WON'T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! No, no, no, no, no!

When compared with the suppression of anarchy every other question sinks into insignificance. The anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind, and his is a deeper degree of criminality than any other. No immigrant is allowed to come to our shores if he is an anarchist; and no paper published here or abroad should be permitted circulation in this country if it propagates anarchist opinions.

All the emphasis on crime and drugs and pornography used to justify the supression of the Internet is really aimed at supressing knowledge of the radical political alternatives that are now available.

Lolita is pornography, and we do not plan to review it.

Personally I wish the police had truncheoned the English fans to death, but I can't really say that on the record.

I do not endorse them [Landmark Education] - never have. The SOBs have already sued me once. I'm afraid to tell you what I really think about them because I'm not covered by any lawyers like I was when I wrote my book.

Roughly, so to say, you know, I am N-TTL-SH-P or so; You are gated after Hall, That's all. I mean that's nearly all.

There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are 7 you can't say on television. What a ratio that is! 399,993 : to 7. They must really be baaad. They must be outrageous to be separated from a group that large. 'All of you words over here, you seven : baaad words'. That's what they told us, right? 'That's a bad word!!' Awww. No bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions, and wooords. You know the seven, don't you? That you can't say on TV? Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. Huh? Those are the heavy seven. Those are the words that'll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war. Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits, wow! And tits doesn't even belong on the list! It seems like such a friendly word. Sounds like a nickname. 'Hey Tits, come here man! Tits! Meet my friend Toots. Toots, Tits. Tits, Toots'. Sounds like a snack : oh yeah, it is. Right. But I don't mean your sexist snack, I mean new Nabisco Tits. Corn Tits n' Sesame Tits n' Cheese Tits : Tater Tits. Bet you can't eat just one!!

von Humboldt (seeing a newspaper containing slanderous falsehoods against Jefferson on the President's desk) : Why do you not have the fellow hung who dares to write these abominable lies? Jefferson : What! hang the guardians of the public morals? No, sir, - rather would I protect the spirit of freedom which dictates even that degree of abuse. Put that paper into your pocket, my good friend, carry it with you to Europe, and when you hear any one doubt the reality of American freedom, show them that paper, and tell them where you found it. Humboldt : But is it not shocking that virtuous characters should be defamed? Jefferson : Let their actions refute such libels. Believe me, virtue is not long darkened by the clouds of calumny; and the temporary pain which it causes is infinitely overweighed by the safety it insures against degeneracy in the principles and conduct of public functionaries. When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.

I must confess that I feel grateful for the banning, or the temporary withdrawal, of de Mello's books. I had heard of him, but never read his writings. Excommunication, somehow, has far more news value than beatification. So also the suppression of a book attracts greater publicity than its publication. ~ T.K. Thomas

The 'Laforgue edition' (1826-1838), heavily rewritten and censored:

At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream,' was prepared to ask the right question: 'Which side is the federal government on?' That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence, strange, considering how often this same government had been willing to intervene outside the country, often with overwhelming force. John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but done nothing itself except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a 'cooling-off period,' a moratorium on Freedom Rides.

Sir - In finding so much to praise in 'Entertaining Mr. Sloane,' which seems to be nothing more than a highly sensationalized, lurid, crude and over-dramatised picture of life at its lowest, surely your dramatic critic has taken leave of his senses. The effect this nauseating work had on me was to make we want to fill my lungs with some fresh, wholesome Leicester Square air. A distinguished critic, if I quote him correctly, felt the sensation of snakes crawling around his ankles while watching it. Yours truly, Peter Pinnell

For example, take Streicher, he is often classified with me because he was a journalist and propagandist. I always thought him very dumb and a sexual pervert. Therefore, I denounced Der Sturmer in public, although never on the radio, but frequently before classes of 200 to 250 journalists in the political propaganda courses which I gave at the university. I can state this quite frankly. In my defense, I want to touch the story of my relationship to Streicher with only a single sentence. On two occasions I attempted to prohibit Der Sturmer because of pornography. Regarding the protocols of the Elders of Zion, I thought that to be a stupid invention. Those are the only things that I will bring out in my defense in that regard. I think that in former years Streicher was a very cruel man, because I had several experiences with journalists who had been whipped by Streicher here in Nuremberg. They had been placed in concentration camps and I was able to liberate them only through the help of Hess at that time. I also believe that there was more than a little truth to the charges of embezzlement which were rumored at that time. Today I think a trifle better of him. I think he is mainly stupid. The crime does not lie in him but in the man who gave him power - the Fuhrer. I think that Streicher's mind is slow but that he has a certain natural strength which causes him to be a fanatic. This type of dumb individual can often be used for fanatical purposes.

Indeed, over the years I have had many a good laugh at the pompous moralism and blatant dishonesty of India's so-called secularists. Their specialty is to justify double standards, e.g. why mentioning murdered Kashmiri Pandits is 'communal hate-mongering' while the endless litany about murdered Gujarati Muslims is 'secular consciousness-raising'. Sometimes they merely stonewall inconvenient information, such as when they tried to deny and suppress the historical data about the forcible replacement of a Rama temple in Ayodhya by a mosque: given the strength of the evidence, all they could do was to drown out any serious debate with screams and swearwords. But often they do bring out their specific talents at sophistry, such as when they argue that a Common Civil Code, a defining element of all secular states, is a Hindu communalist notion, while the preservation of the divinely-revealed Shari'a for the Muslims is secular. That's when they are at their best.

That should probably be written: no !@#$%^&*:@!semicolon

Some teachers of mankind - as Plato... the first Christians, the orthodox Muslims, and the Buddhists - have gone so far as to repudiate art. ...[They consider it] so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills, that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art. ...such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied - one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. ...Now there is only fear, lest we should be deprived of any pleasures art can afford, so any type of art is patronized. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.

When I had my own company on Traffic and Coonskin, all metaphors were able to get to the screen clearly. In Cool World, with the producer and Paramount watching me carefully to make sure I was in good taste, I instinctively poured stuff into the picture that I wanted to talk about. But when you force stuff, it's not really very clear. But, I have a great love for Max Fleischer, especially some of his Black & White Betty Boops with their strange Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong black folk tale jazz hipness that part of Cool World was a homage in style to those films and that style of cartooning. The Grim Reaper is right out of a Max Fleischer cartoon or old Terrytoons, which is why I hired and love Milton Knight the artist. He understands totally the Uncle Remus fable like qualities behind Fleischer and Terrytoons. Milton Knight is probably the purest artist of that style in the business. He has a hard time because studios think he is old fashioned...but that's the point.

With Obama we started out, we couldn't talk about his big ears 'cause that made him nervous. We've gone from that to this: Not only can we not mention his ears...We can't talk about his mother. We can't talk about his father. We can't talk about his grandmother unless he does, brings her up as a 'typical white person.' We can't talk about his wife, can't talk about his preacher, can't talk about his terrorist friends, can't talk about his voting record, can't talk about his religion. We can't talk about appeasement. We can't talk about color; we can't talk about lack of color. We can't talk about race. We can't talk about bombers and mobsters who are his friends. We can't talk about schooling. We can't talk about his name, 'Hussein.' We can't talk about his lack of experience. Can't talk about his income. Can't talk about his flag pin. This started out we can't call him a liberal. It started out we just couldn't talk about his ears. Now we can't say anything about him.

He cried out through the letter of Dr. Markland, that a young mother lacerated by unskillful surgery in the birth of her babe, but recovering from a subsequent successful operation, had been stabbed, remorselessly, cruelly, brutally stabbed, not with a knife, but with the procreative organ of her husband, stabbed to the doors of death, and yet there was no redress! And because he called a spade a spade, because he named that organ by its own name, so given in Webster's dictionary and in every medical journal in the country, because of this Moses Harman walks to and fro in his cell tonight. He gave a concrete example of the effect of sex slavery, and for it he is imprisoned. It remains for us now to carry on the battle, and lift the standard where they struck him down, to scatter broadcast the knowledge of this crime of society against a man and the reason for it; to inquire into this vast system of licensed crime, its cause and its effect, broadly upon the race.

[at Rock the Bells, New York, 2007] 'A couple of months ago, those fascist motherfuckers at the Fox News Network attempted to pin this band into a corner by suggesting that we said that the president should be assassinated. Nah, what we said was that he should be brought to trial as war criminal and hung and shot. THAT'S what we said. And we don't back away from the position because the real assassinator is Bush and Cheney and the whole administration for the lives they have destroyed here and in Iraq. They're the ones. And what they refused to air which was far more provocative in my mind and in the minds of my bandmates is this: this system has become so brutal and vicious and cruel that it needs to start wars and profit from the destruction around the world in order to survive as a world power. THAT's what we said. And we refuse not to stand up, we refuse to back down from that position not only for the poor kids who are being left out in the desert to die, but for the Iraqi youth, the Iraqi people, their families and their friends, and their youth who are standing up and resisting the U.S. occupation every day. And if we truly want to end this fucking miserable war, we have to stand up with the same force that the Iraqi youth are standing up with every day, and bring these motherfuckers to their knees. Wake up:'

[at Alpine Valley, 2007] 'A couple of months back when we played this show at Coachella, Valley, that was our first show back, I said a few things from the stage that the next day, Fox News ran this whole piece about us saying that the President should be assassinated. But those fascists always get it wrong when it's from a band in the corner standing up. What we said was that the whole Bush Administration should be put on trial for war crimes, and then hung, and then shot. But this made me think about something: It made me think about what the fuck they're so afraid of. It made me think about what scares them. Is it really four of us from Los Angeles that have a point of view? Is it really just this music, and these rhythms, and these words? Is that what they're scared of? I started to think about it and you know, my conclusion is this: naw, they ain't scared of us. They're scared of you. They're scared of you. They're scared that you might, come election time, throw Bush, and Cheney, and all their fascists out of power. That's what they're scared of. And let me say this: that the Democrats are scared of you too, because they know that you see through their bullshit too. Because when Bush was wiretappin', spying on citizens, torturing innocent people, they were supposed to be the people to defend us from them. And they didn't do shit. So the Democrats are scared of you too. Why? Because they know they're coming to power. But they're scared because they know that if they don't fuckin' start pulling troops out of Iraq, then we're gonna go and burn down every office, of every Senator that doesn't do their jobs. All we're saying is that the world is watching us right now. The whole world is watching us. The brothers and sisters in South America that are dealing with this imperialist violence have their eyes on us. Our brothers and sisters in Iraq got their eyes on us because we are the ones who are gonna have to put an end to this nonsense. So wake up! Come on, wake up! Wake up...'

'Hoover, he was a body remover