“I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown.”

Violence isn’t always evil. What’s evil is the infatuation with violence.

Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous

Do you know the warm progress under the stars? Do you know we exist? Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom? Have you been born yet & are you alive?

I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. Anything else is just…in between.

How can I set free anyone who doesn’t have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom? I think it’s a lie – people claim they want to be free

A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.

You feel your strength in the experience of pain.

The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces.

I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think.

I want to have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it.

A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them.

How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don’t really want to be free?

They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.

People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit

Maybe primitive people have less bullshit to let go of, to give up.

Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn’t end the war. And that’s what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That’s our shame.

It’s funny how the hippies and the punks tried to get rid of the conservatives, but they always seem to get the upper hand in the end.

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else

The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.

My parents were hippies.

We’ve painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare – triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights – or a leap to an entirely different level. We’ve taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.

The hippie era was a wonderful time because we still believed we could make the world a better place.

The bipartisan approach filtered up through my typewriter. I used to say, “Mad takes on both sides.”