“Today’s art has been cancelled due to police activity.”

Some people represent authority without ever possessing any of their own.

People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.

I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don’t do that so much anymore.

If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you’ve made your own sculpture.

Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.

It’s impossible to predict which paintings will last and which won’t. In New Orleans I painted on a dilapidated shop in a street littered with abandoned cars and rotting mattresses, then two hours later the piece was gone. It turned out I’d picked the side of a crack house and the proprietor didn’t like the attention.

I’d been painting rats for three years before someone said ‘that’s clever it’s an anagram of art’ and I had to pretend I’d known that all along.

If you feel dirty, insignificant or unloved, then rats are a good role model. They exist without permission, they have no respect for the hierarchy of society, and they have sex 50 times a day.

If you don’t own a train company then you go and paint on one instead… it all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something… that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it.

I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It’s people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.

Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else.

I love the way capitalism finds a place – even for its enemies.

The grumpier you are, the more assholes you meet.

You owe the companies nothing. You especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn’t mean I’m anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.

One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign. He said, “Didn’t you see the stop sign?” I said, “Yeah, but I don’t believe everything I read”

The police must obey the law while enforcing the law.

The most personal thing I’ve put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It’s better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.

You cannot undermine police authority and then complain about rising crime.

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.

Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureacracy, no police, no standing army.