If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.
There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it, like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat it.
Don’t agonize. Organize.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him that if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Some men rob you with a six-gun, / Some with a fountain pen.
A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
Don’t you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don’t you know there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don’t you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath if they could not pay for air?
The truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.
Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
If you love the law and you love good sausage, don’t watch either of them being made.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
The equality of the capitalist and the laborer is the same as the equality of two fighters, when the hands of one are bound, while a gun is put into the hands of the other, and equal conditions are strictly observed for both in the fight.
Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
God, we’ve been searching for you. What an incredible fortune there would be for you, God! Can you imagine the looks you’d get from your neighbors? But don’t just sit there, God.
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations.
To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one’s responsibility as a free man.
I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on.
The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
I’m a pessimist about probabilities; I’m an optimist about possibilities.
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
