“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.”

A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power. We are not interested in the greening of Amerika except for the grass that will cover its grave.

The essence of successful revolution, be it for an individual, a community of individuals, or a nation, depends on accepting that challenge.

The ’60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great.

I learned one thing; you never do anything for fame or money. You only do things ’cause they’re fun or good. If you can combine the two at the same time, you can make a contribution to the world and have a lot of happiness.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Life-actors never rehearse and need no script. A life-actor uses whatever he has available, nothing more, nothing less.

Once you get the right image the details aren’t that important.

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain’t going.

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.

When I appear in the Chicago courtroom, I want to be tried not because I support the NLF – which I do – but because I have long hair.

Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?

The idea that media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that’s about tenth or eleventh on their list.

Peace is a very complicated concept. When the lion gobbles up the lamb and wipes his lips, then there’s peace. Well, I ain’t for that peace at all.

If you don’t have sex and you don’t do drugs, your rock ‘n’ roll better be awfully good.

Wouldn’t you want to be indicted by the govenment for a high crime? It’s a great thrill. It’s an honor. It’s a compliment. It’s fun. I’m enjoying every minute of it!

Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.

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.”