#System Quotes

“How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.”

“That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.”

“The truth is we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.”

“It's just that I landed up in a terrific capitalist system. One that pays people who allocate capital extraordinarily well. Intrinsically, I'm not worth as much as somebody who invents something that could improves people's life, or health or whatever.”

“There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we've got a system that allows them to do it.”

“The truth is that the want of common education with us is not from our poverty, but from the want of an orderly system. More money is now paid for the education of a part than would be paid for that of the whole if systematically arranged.”

“There are so many groups making so much money in the medical care system that any major reorganization is going to make someone unhappy or anxious at the least, ... I don't know how you do it.”

“Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principles.”

“The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf.”

“Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and extravagances are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system. The foundation and superstructure of the government is bad. Prop it as you please, it continually sinks and ever will.”

“It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.”

“It is beneath human dignity to lose one's individuality and become a mere cog in the machine.”

“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth”

“If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake.”

“The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end?”

“The problem with education is school.”

“Schools and colleges are really a factory for turning out clerks for the Government.”

“I have discovered that man is superior to the system he propounds.”

“That is what capitalism is: a system that brings wealth to the many, not just the few.”

“Reform is for people who have government connections, revolution is for the people!”

“The agricultural co-operative movement has been a severe ideological and political struggle from the very beginning. No cooperative can be established without going through such a struggle. Before a brand-new social system can be built on the site of the old, the site must be swept clean. Invariably, remnants of old ideas reflecting the old system remain in people's minds for a long time, and they do not easily give way. After a co-operative is established, it must go through many more struggles before it can be consolidated. Even then, the moment it relaxes its efforts it may collapse.”

“The Negro's so-called 'revolt' is merely an asking to be accepted into the existing system!”

“I can't be a slave to the machine, you feel like you're in the matrix.”

“Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?”

“Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.”

“There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.”

“Finance, like time, devours its own children.”

“Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.”

“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”

“The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.”

“One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing.”

“Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.”

“Veels vithin veels, a prison in a prison.”

“But the mere truth won't do. You must have a lawyer.”

“Public school system status quo is indefensible.”

“Stop and think a little: Are you the victim of the system?”

“My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.”

“One good thing about music, when it hits-you feel no pain. ... My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die. ... Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen. ... My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.”

“The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.”

“I can't even get a credit card without three credit bureaus saying I'm good enough.”

“For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.”

“The structural unity of the parts is such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and dis­turbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference is not an organic part of the whole.”