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"You think of killing himon the spotbut discard that thought andleave,down into the urine-stinkingelevator, they have you crucified too, America at work, where they rip out your intestinesand your brain and your will and your spirit. They suck you dry, then throw you away. The capitalist system. The work ethic. The profit motive. The memory of your father's words,"work hard and you'll be appreciated. of course, only if you make much more for them than they payyou."
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"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
"She wanted us to have more than five choices. Now we have none."
"Conner Lassiter. Scheduled to be unwound the 21st of November-until you went AWOL. You caused an accident that killed a bus driver, left dozens of others injured, and shut down an interstate highway for hours. Then, on top of it, you took a hostage AND shot a Juvey-cop with his own tranq gun."..."He's the Akron AWOL?!"
"There he is then, the unfortunate brute, quite miserable because of me, for whom there is nothing to be done, and he so anxious to help, so used to giving orders and to being obeyed. There he is, ever since I came into the world, possibly at his instigation, I wouldn't put it past him, commanding me to be well, you know, in every way, no complaints at all, with as much success as if he were shouting at a lump of inanimate matter."
"The oppressor is never as free as they think they are."
"When you don't make it too far from the plantation, you might as well befriend your captors."
"Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission."
"Slaves in the past were captured by force, today's slaves surrender themselves. The masters are the same old folk (who are now more civilized) who would not lift a hand against a fellow human being! They have established economic systems that perpetuate their superiority so the poor are blamed either for their laziness or their fate."
"If you put a chain around the neck of a slave the other end fastens itself around your own."
"How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure? The answer is simple: this arrogant individual, whose power of authority and fear of losing it has gone to his head, has difficulty remembering he was once a man; he thinks he is a whip or a gun; he is convinced that the domestication of the "inferior races" is obtained by governing their reflexes. He disregards the human memory, the indelible reminders; and then, above all, there is this that perhaps he never know: we only become what we are by radically negating deep down what others have done to us."
Explore more quotes by Charles Bukowski
"Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have."
"Since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light."
"There may not be a hell, but those who judge may create one. I think people are over-taught. They are over-taught everything. You have to find out by what happens to you, how you will react. I'll have to use a strange term here, "good". I don't know where it comes from, but I feel that there's an ultimate strain of goodness born in each of us. I don't believe in God, but I believe in this "goodness like a tube running through our bodies. It can be nurtured. It's always magic, when on a freeway packed with traffic, a stranger makes room for you to change lanes, it gives you hope."
"The writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever."
"Endurance is more important than truth because without endurance there can't be any truth. And truth means going to the end like you mean it. That way, death itself comes up short when it grabs."
"You shoulda known the entirety of the trap, a**hole,love means eventual painvictory means eventual defeatgrace means eventual slovenliness,there's no wayout...you see, youunderstand?"
"The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited."
"Alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul,and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds.flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh.there's no chance at all:we are all trapped by a singular fate.nobody ever finds the one.the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the mad houses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills."
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