“Against inebriation – and for drunkenness! Burn down the liquor stores, and replace them with playgrounds!”
— CrimethInc.
“Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed – that’s where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They’re the cynical corpses of idealistic young people who thought the system could be reformed.”
— CrimethInc.
“Right and wrong are superstitions; your desires, however, are real. Those who cannot achieve their desires, or who despair of doing so, often compensate by constructing imaginary frameworks. For example, if you wish to live in a world in which no one exploits animals, it is moralism to judge those who eat meat immoral instead of setting about disabling the animal exploitation industry. People retreat into moralism as a sort of consolation prize, for it is easier to rule in the realm of good and evil, fictitious as it may be, than to come to terms with our limited leverage upon this world and yet persist in endeavoring to change it.”
— CrimethInc.
“Economy: As an adjective, cheap; As a noun, that which compels us to render ourselves as such.”
— CrimethInc.
“Accident – A statistical inevitability. Some nuclear power plants are built on fault lines, but ever mine, dam, oil rig, and waste dump is founded upon a tacit acceptance of the worst-case scenario. One a long enough timeline, everything that can go wrong will, however small the likelihood is from one day to the next. The responsible parties may wring their hands about the Fukushima meltdown – and the Gult of Mexico oil spill, and the Exxon Valdez, and Hurricane Katrina, and Chernobyl, and Haiti – but accident is no accident.”
— CrimethInc.
“Can we imagine a togetherness that isn’t founded on gross generalizations, conceptualizing ourselves as unique individuals who still stand to gain from looking out for one another? Can we identify with each other rather than with categories or masters?”
— CrimethInc.
“Tomorrow will use you the way you use today.”
— CrimethInc.
“Gun Control: A measure to ensure that guns always point in one direction.”
— CrimethInc.
“What is common becomes sense, but what is sensible doesn’t always become common.”
— CrimethInc.
“Historically, the ‘deadline’ was the line around a prison beyond which prisoners were eligible for shooting. In keeping with shifts in the exercise of control, what one was delineated spatially over life is now enforced temporarily over labor.”
— CrimethInc.
“In the United States, people don’t revolt in order to obtain freedom, but continue denying it to others.”
— CrimethInc.
“One does not suffer nearly so much from one’s inadequacies as from one’s unused abilities.”
— CrimethInc.
“There is no returning to the masses – once your forays into theory have borne you far enough away from them that you can perceive them and the benefits of being among them. the only return is through the process of disillusionment; one must cease to care about motivating the masses to be reunited with them. Likewise, there is no converting them – no matter how many people you come to join you at your outpost, from up close they will never look as impressive as the distant crowd.”
— CrimethInc.
“Feeling that one has some leverage upon something, even by proxy or association, makes one a great deal more interested in it.”
— CrimethInc.
“We want ecstasy as a way of life, not a liver-poisoning alcoholiday from it.”
— CrimethInc.
“See you on the other side of the screen, if you make it, earnest cyberspace cadet.”
— CrimethInc.
“What’s the point of doing anything if nobody’s watching?”
— CrimethInc.
“Media is an assemblage of tools with which to expand an audience’s conception of what “the world” is to such and extent that their own lives and capabilities seem utterly insignificant; a means of psychological warfare by which people are overloaded with information and desensitized to their own and others’ suffering; the sum of all means by which human beings reduce the infinite complexity of reality to a dead-end maze of abstractions.”
— CrimethInc.
“Only by concealing our identities can we shed the masks we have to wear at school, at work, even at home – everywhere there is surveillance, policing, punishment – masks that are increasingly indistinguishable from ourselves.”
— CrimethInc.
“Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn’t that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn’t freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?”
— CrimethInc.
“After simmering years of censorship and repression, the masses finally throng the streets. The chants echoing off the walls to build to a roar from all directions, stoking the courage of the crowds as they march on the center of the capital. Activists inside each column maintain contact with each other via text messages; communications centers receive reports and broadcast them around the city; affinity groups plot the movements of the police via digital mapping. A rebel army of bloggers uploads video footage for all the world to see as the two hosts close for battle. Suddenly, at the moment of truth, the lines go dead. The insurgents look up from the blank screens of their cell phones to see the sun reflecting off the shields of the advancing riot police, who are still guided by close circuits of fully networked technology. The rebels will have to navigate by dead reckoning against a hyper-informed adversary. All this already happened, years ago, when President Mubarak shut down the communications grid during the Egyptian uprising of 2011. A generation hence, when the same scene recurs, we can imagine the middle-class protesters – the cybourgeoisie – will simply slump forward, blind and deaf and wracked by seizures as the microchips in their cerebra run haywire, and it will be up to the homeless and destitute to guide them to safety.”
— CrimethInc.
“At first, one only recognizes particular instances to be worth of critique; critique appears synonymous with rejection, implying deficiency in the object. Over time, one discovers that everything warrants critique. This can produce cynicism: nothing is above reproach, nothing is pure, therefore nothing has value. But followed through to its logical conclusion, this insight inspires a profound optimism: if everything can be critiqued, then no matter how bleak things are, there is always a way to improve them. Those who comprehend this can pass beyond the binary of approval and disapproval to identify the conflicting currents within any subject of inquiry. There are sides to take inside every position, as well as between them.”
— CrimethInc.
“Whom one is speaking to – or which aspect of their character – fundamentally determines the meaning and consequences of an exhortation. ‘Indulge Your Desires’ comes across very differently on a billboard advertising SUVs than it does spray-painted across the broken windows of an SUV dealer. It follows that what you say is not nearly as important as how and when you say it.”
— CrimethInc.
“[Alcohol] not only replaces positive actions which would address the root causes of our despondency – it prevents them, as more energy becomes focused on achieving and recovering from the drunken state.”
— CrimethInc.
“Others found the implication odd that they could live their way forever- working and drinking and watching TV- and why they would want to.”
— CrimethInc.
“I always secretly looked forward to nothing going as planned. That way, I wasn’t limited by my imagination. That way, anything can, and always did, happen.”
— CrimethInc.
“Life’s most beautiful and inspiring moments occur at 3am, just prowling, looking for nothing but always finding something.”
— CrimethInc.
“Victory will not go to those who can inflict the most suffering, but to those who can survive the most.”
— CrimethInc.
“Only those prepared to go too far will learn how far they can go.”
— CrimethInc.
“There is no “wrong train.”
— CrimethInc.