A Quote by Noam Chomsky
As soon as one identifies, challenges and overcomes illegitimate power, he or she is an anarchist. Most people are anarchists. What they call themselves doesn’t matter to me. The world is full of suffering, distress, violence and catastrophes. Students must decide: does something concern you or not? I say: look around, analyze the problems, ask yourself what you can do and set out on the work!
Related Quotes
One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists.
We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical.
People who say that life is not worthwhile are really saying that they themselves have no personal goals which are worthwhile. Prescription: Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project. Decide what you want out of a situation. Always have something ahead of you to “look forward to” — to work for and hope for.
Personally, I just want to work on stuff that challenges me, that excites me, and that I think is original. You want to do something that does to other people what films do to you. It's the most wonderful thing in the world when you can lose yourself from reality and go into a story, and believe it and go on that journey with people, and you have to work that will somehow do that. It won't always, but hopefully sometimes.
Violence, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the anarchist philosophy. It has repeatedly been pointed out by anarchist thinkers that the revolution can neither be won, nor the anarchist society established and maintained, by armed violence.
Me is what them call illegitimate, that mean say me is a criminal, bomba rassclaat! That's why me go write a song called 'Illegitimate Children.' It took me years to find out I was one.
If you ask people to do things and they usually don't get around to them, stop asking yourself, "What's the matter with people these days?" Instead, ask yourself, "What's the matter with me? What am I doing or failing to do that causes people to give me empty promises?"
You must constantly ask yourself these questions: Who am I around? What are they doing to me? What have they got me reading? What have they got me saying? Where do they have me going? What do they have me thinking? And most important, what do they have me becoming? Then ask yourself the big question: Is that okay? Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.
Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.
Transcendentalism is, we might say, an early form of anarchism. The Transcendentalists also did not call themselves anarchists, but there are anarchist ideas in their thinking and in their literature. They were all suspicious of authority. We might say that the Transcendentalism played a role in creating an atmosphere of skepticism towards authority, towards government.
I find that getting something on the screen as soon as possible really helps focus the problem for me. It helps me decide what to work on next. Because if you're just looking at that big to-do list it's like, eh, I don't know which one I should do—does it matter which one I do? But if there's something you can actually look at, even if it's just the debug output of your mailbox parser, it's like, OK, there!
Commit to growing yourself. Do not avoid problems and or complain about problems. Don't let them bother you. In fact, don't even call them problems; refer to them as "challenges" or "situations". Let go of the emotion and drama you create when you don't get what you want. Just stay present and handle one situation at a time with an open mind and an open heart. Trust yourself and in the universe that everything will work out in the end.
Look at Jane Lynch, another Chicagoan. She has a career I'd kill for. She does amazing work; she's famous enough to have some power, but not so famous she has to deal with people buzzing around her life.
Feelings, by themselves, do not create problems. It is rather the tendency to interpret and analyze them. When out of habit you believe those interpretations, it is there that the suffering begins.
Students need to decide, 'All right, well, does the height matter? Does the side of it matter? Does the color of the valve matter? What matters here?' - such an underrepresented question in math curriculum.
I've told the kids in the ghettos that violence won't solve their problems, but then they ask me, and rightly so; "Why does the government use massive doses of violence to bring about the change it wants in the world?" After this I knew that I could no longer speak against the violence in the ghettos without also speaking against the violence of my government.
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