Abbie Hoffman Quotes

American activist (1936–1989)

Abbott Howard "Abbie" Hoffman (30 November 1936 – 12 April 1989) was a social and political activist in the United States, co-founder of the Youth International Party ("Yippies"), and later, a fugitive from the law, who lived under an alias following a conviction for dealing cocaine.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Barry Freed

Birth Name: Abbot Howard Hoffman

Alternative Names: Abbie Hoffmann • Abbott Hoffman • Abbie hoffman • Abbott Howard Hoffman • America Hoffman • Abbott "Abbie" Hoffman

From Wikidata (CC0)

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

You ask, "What about the innocent bystanders?" But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent.

THE KEY TO ORGANIZING AN ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY IS TO ORGANIZE PEOPLE AROUND WHAT THEY CAN DO AND MORE IMPORTANTLY WHAT THEY WANT TO DO.

STRUCTURE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN CONTENT IN THE TRANSMISSION OF INFORMATION. It is the same as saying "the medium is the message."

I can only related to Chicago as a personal anarchist, a revolutionary artist. If that sounds egotistical, tough shit. My concept of reality comes from what I see, touch, and feel, The rest, as far as I'm concerned, didn't happen. If it did, so what, then it happened. Great! I am my own leader I make my own rules. The revolution is whereever my boots hit the ground. If the Left considers this adventurism, fuck 'em, they are a total bureaucratic bore.

Nostalgia is a form of depression both for a society and an individual.

Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them.

It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List.

In the nineteen-sixties, apartheid was driven out of America. Legal segregation — Jim Crow — ended. We didn't end racism, but we ended legal segregation. We ended the idea that you can send a million soldiers ten thousand miles away to fight in a war that people do not support. We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens. Now, it doesn't matter who sits in the Oval Office. But the big battles that were won in that period of civil war and strife you cannot reverse. We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong … and we were right! I regret nothing!

I see Judaism as a way of life. Sticking up for the underdog. Being an outsider. A critic of society. The kid on the corner who says the emperor has no clothes on. The Prophet.

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

For six years, the only consistent thing about our national drug policy has been its inconsistency. Harsher penalties, urine testing, hysteria, budget cuts and the simplistic "Just Say No!' campaign (the equivalent of telling manic depressives to "just cheer up") have returned drug education and treatment to the Reefer Madness era.

If this guy is God, then this is the God that the United States of America deserves.

I only regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.

I feel like a famous Indian Chief of the Fagowee nations, who led his tribe for 40 years in the desert amidst starvation, hunger, famine, strife, plague — finally staggered up to the top of this mountain, drug crazed, looked out and pounded his chest and said, "Where the fuck are we? Where the fuck are we?"

Abbie Hoffman Quotes

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