Quotes about underground (142 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I'm hiding underground, I can't hear no sound”

E.M.S (1995) Nigerian rapper, singer and record producer

Hidden (2017)

“I gotta big mouth, I can't help it, I talk from my heart, I'm real you know what I'm sayin whatever comes comes. But my controverse problems, It's not my fault, I try to find my way in the world you know, I try to be somebody instead of just, make money off of everybody. You know what im saying, so I go down paths that haven't been traveled before and I usually mess up, but I learn, you know what I'm saying, I come back stronger, I'm not talking ignorant, you know what I'm saying. So obviously put thought into what I do. So I think my mouth, my controverse, I have not been out of the paper since I joined Digital Underground, I've been in all, you know what I'm saying, my name has not been not uttered, you know what I'm saying, and that's good for me because I don't wanna be forgotten. If I'm forgotten then that means I'm comfortable and that means I think everything is okay.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

1990s, MTV interview (1994)

Money , World , Way , Travel

“How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Feeling , Reality

“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.”

Terry Pratchett book Small Gods

Source: Small Gods

Fear

“I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.”

S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) American humorist, author, and screenwriter

"Captain Future, Block That Kick!," The New Yorker (20 January 1940) p. 23 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1940/01/20/captain-future-block-that-kick
Published in book form under the same title in The Most of S. J. Perelman (1992) p. 71

Law , Beauty , Girl , Waiting

“I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it. I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come.”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)
Context: These military tribunals have, decidedly, a most singular idea of justice.
This is the plain truth, Mr. President, and it is terrifying. It will leave an indelible stain on your presidency. I realise that you have no power over this case, that you are limited by the Constitution and your entourage. You have, nonetheless, your duty as a man, which you will recognise and fulfill. As for myself, I have not despaired in the least, of the triumph of right. I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it. I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come.

Truth , Justice , Light

“She seemed able to face with equal equanimity the rigours of fascist cruelty and suppression that she was dealt as a Jew; the problems of practising underground medicine in wartime; the difficulties posed by prejudice and discrimination against women; and the near isolation and challenges of those working at the cutting edge of science.”

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) Italian neurologist

Obituary in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/dec/30/rita-levi-montalcini
About

Women , Problem , Science

“Pornography’s male-born explicitness renders visible what is invisible, woman’s chthonic internality. It tries to shed Apollonian light on woman’s anxiety-provoking darkness. The vulgar contortionism of pornography is the serpentine tangle of Medusan nature. Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature. The banning of pornography, rightly sought by Judeo-Christianity, would be a victory over the west’s stubborn paganism. But pornography cannot be banned, only driven underground, where its illicit charge will be enhanced.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 35

Imagination , Nature , Freedom , Light

“Whenever undiscussables exist, their existence is also undiscussable. Moreover, both are covered up, because rules that make important issues undiscussables violate espoused norms… It is very difficult to manage [organizational defense routines]. They continue to exist and proliferate because they are relegated to the realm of “underground management” and all sides tacitly agree to this state of affairs. As a result, organizational defense routines often are very powerful”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Source: On organizational learning (1999), p. 438 as cited in: Leni Wildflower, ‎Diane Brennan (2011) The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Coaching. p. 159

“You have demonstrated that when young people have the tools to succeed -- good schools, education in math and science, an economy that nurtures creativity and entrepreneurship -- then societies will flourish. […] Where women are full participants in a country’s politics or economy, societies are more likely to succeed. […] If young people live in places where the only option is between the dictates of a state, or the lure of an extremist underground, then no counterterrorism strategy can succeed. But where a genuine civil society is allowed to flourish -- where people can express their views, and organize peacefully for a better life -- then you dramatically expand the alternatives to terror.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Address to the United Nations (September 2014)

Life , Women , People , Education

“And the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was supposedly an “open” city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen underground. And then tens of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one another, became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. … Everything was gone but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night

Introduction (1966)
Mother Night (1961)

Love , Men , War , Hope

“Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, gas, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is! It is all the work of the Devil!”

Otto Dix (1891–1969) German painter and printmaker

Quote from Dix' War Diary 1915–1916, Städtische Gallery, Albstadt, p. 25; as cited by Eva Karcher, Otto Dix, New York: Crown Publishers, 1987, p. 14

War , Cats

“Oak… lasts for an unlimited period when buried in underground structures.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

...when exposed to moisture... it cannot take in liquid on account of its compactness, but, withdrawing from the moisture, it resists it and warps, thus making cracks.
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter IX, Sec. 8

“Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom," a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions—North and South, black and white, labor and management—but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.”

P. J. O'Rourke book Republican Party Reptile

Republican Party Reptile (1987)

Coffee , Drink , Baby , Weather

“Rabbit underground, rabbit safe and sound.”

Richard Adams book Watership Down

Watership Down

“You're not happy to see me, then?' Jace said. 'I have to say, I'm surprised. I've always been told my presence brightened up any room. One might think that went doubly for dank underground cells.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Variant: I'm glad you think this is funny."
"You'rehappy to see me, then?" Jace asked. "I have to say, I'm surprised. I've always been told my presence brightened up any room. One might think that went doubly for dank underground cells.
Source: City of Glass

Thinking , Happiness

“I've always been told my presence brightened up any room. One might think that went doubly for dank underground cell." (Jace)”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Thinking

“Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)

World , Fools

“Underground, the stars are legend.”

Catherine Fisher book Incarceron

Source: Incarceron

Star

“The underground of the city is like what's underground in people. Beneath the surface, it's boiling with monsters.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

People

“You shouldn't judge someone until you've walk a mile through an underground tunnel in her uncomfortable shoes”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Shoe

“Oh, lord. I was beginning to think like Neith. Soon I'd be huddled in an underground bunker eating army rations and cackling as I sewed together the pockets of all the boys who'd jilted me.”

Rick Riordan book The Serpent's Shadow

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

Boy , Thinking

“If it's true, why do they leave us to live like this? With the hunger and the killings and the Games?" And suddenly I hate this imaginary underground city of District 13 and those who sit by, watching us die. They're no better than the Capitol.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Hunger , Hate , Game

“Hope can be bruised and battered. It can be forced underground and even rendered unconscious, but hope cannot be killed.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnSouled

Hope

“Nico drew his sword. His smile was even more unsettling than his scowl.

"Underground," he said. "My favorite place."

Underground wasJason's favorite place.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

Smile

“I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.”

Cory Doctorow Little Brother

Source: Little Brother

Life , Freedom , Waiting

“Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.”

Mohsin Hamid book The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Source: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

People

“Underground. Which I hate. Like mines and tunnels and 13. Underground, where I dread dying, which is stupid because even if I die aboveground, the next thing they'll do is bury me underground anyway.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Hate , Stupidity

“It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

“A serious mistake in a nightie,
A grave disappointment all round
Is all that you'll get from th'Almighty,
Is all that you'll get underground.
Oh he said: "If you lay off the crumpet
I'll see you alright in the end.
Just hang on until the last trumpet.
Have faith in me, chum – I'm your friend."”

James Fenton (1949) poet

"God, a Poem", line 5, from Children in Exile (1983)

Faith , Disappointment

“I was lucky to be part of the "underground comix" thing in which cartoonists were completely free to express themselves. To function on those terms means putting everything out in the open—no need to hold anything back—total liberation from censorship, including the inner censor! A lot of my satire is considered by some to be "too hard." My "negro" characters are not about black people, but are more about pushing these "uncool" stereotypes in readers' faces, so suddenly they have to deal with a very tacky part of our human nature. … Who did I think I was appealing to? I don't know. I was just being a punk, putting down on paper all these messy parts of the culture we internalize and keep quiet about. I admit I'm occasionally embarrassed when I look at some of that work now.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 256

People , Nature , Thinking , Parting

“Our own British Communist Party – if it is our own and British – might at any time suffer a change of heart and go back to bloody revolution. For all I know it may there already, underground. Anything is possible for a party which at one and the same time shouts for a United Front and puts up candidates against us with a view to splitting the Labour vote. All this is alien to our honest, straightforward, native, Socialist thought. … But you can't all the time say 'No, No, No' to the Communists. The real answer to the Communists is a positive answer. We have to show more vigorous fighting enthusiasm, more faith, more sense of high adventure.”

Herbert Morrison (1888–1965) British Labour politician

Peter Howard, "Men on Trial" (Blandford Press, 1945), p. 37-8
Speech in December 1944

Faith , Sense , Suffering , Change

“For John Howard to get to any high moral ground he would have to first climb out of the volcanic hole he's dug for himself over the last decade. You know, it's like one of those deep diamond mined holes in South Africa, you know, they're about a mile underground. He'd have to come a mile up to get to even equilibrium, let alone have any contest in morality with Kevin Rudd.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

ABC Radio interview, March 5, 2007.

“For nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Woonotes II, st. 7
1840s, Poems (1847)

Beauty , Nature , Perfection , Sea

“Many nights I stood on the bridge — and in the middle alone — lost — a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness — crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers — here and there lights resembling suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites — shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion, like blood in the arteries—at times, ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill sulphurous voice of the trolley wires — now and then strange moanings of appeal from tugboats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below — I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY.”

Joseph Stella (1877–1946) American artist

Source: "The Brooklyn Bridge (A page of my life)," 1929, p. 88; Cited in: Beth Venn, Adam D. Weinberg. Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900-1950 : Works from the Whitney Museum of American Art. University of California Press, 1999. p. 123

Religion , Mountain , Light , Time

“To take such generous contracts and screw them up so dramatically must suggest that these are the most probably the worst business people ever assembled in one place to run anything. … the civil servants were taken to the cleaners and on the face of it you still end up with a £750 million overspend based on your mismanagement of them. I think they should be sacked, hung drawn and quartered, thrown out of the country and the whole thing (the London Underground) returned to public ownership. I saw that they (Metronet management) wanted to talk to the Mayor about this — wasting their breath sunshine! — they can go out and raise the money amongst their shareholders who came here to get their snout in the trough — they screwed it up; they are not getting any of our money!”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Remarks made regarding the management of Metronet and the PPP of the London Underground during a Mayor's press conference (13 March 2007)

Money , People , Business , Thinking

“Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Love , Angels , Feeling , Soul

“If you think about it, being digital is Italian. It's underground, provocative, interactive. It has humor, discourse, and debate. It has a kind of liveliness to it.”

Nicholas Negroponte (1943) American computer scientist

Being Nicholas, The Wired Interview by Thomas A. Bass http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bd1101bn.htm

Thinking

“The kindergarten essay got into that underground press we all belong to where something just sort of has a life of its own and moves around and it gets on refrigerators and in the work place and people copy it… I was a minister in the Unitarian church at the time and teaching and I was ready to stop that and do the next phase of my life. So I had quit both those jobs and I was all set up with my studio in Seattle when this other horse came riding by … I'm not a great writer and I'll never get the Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer Prize but I've won the refrigerator door award. And you don't see Faulkner on people's refrigerator.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Robert Fulghum : Philosopher King

Life , People , Time , Horse

“The French botanist and chemist Henri-Louis Duhamel de Monceau (1700–1782) identified a fungal disease on the bulbs of saffron crocus (now named Helicobasidium purpureum) and illustrated its sclerotia on the bulbs. His report was read to the Academie royale des Sciences in April 1728; it was “wellconceived, thorough, and conclusive, and led to his election as adjoint chimiste in the same year” (Eklund 1971:223). Duhamel discovered that this fungus spreads underground from one bulb to another. In his Éléments d’agriculture (two volumes, 1762; English edition, 1764), he also accepted insects as a cause of some plant diseases.”

Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700–1782) French naval engineer, botanist and agronomist

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, " A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 29: Plant Disease Studies During the 1700s http://esapubs.org/bulletin/current/history_list/history29.pdf." in: Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, July 2008, p. 231-242.

Disease , Science , Reading

“So, what else is going on? Music? Fine, here is The Beatles, The Stones come here later this evening, there is The Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin has just gone to lunch. So, do you want something to do in between now and then, I'd grow my hair and fornicate if I were you.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Monster (2004)

Music

“All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing — the one true thing!”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Tombs of Atuan (1971), Chapter 7, "The Great Treasure" (Arha)

Silence , Night

“Then (in 1981) we did a book by Geoffrey Rips called "Unamerican Activities," which was a documentation of the subversion of the underground press. That was when the Freedom of Information Act made those files available. We were shocked, we couldn't believe that our government had been bombing people, infiltrating their organizations. In fact, I think one of the files listed Lawrence as a "beatnik rabble-rouser."”

Nancy Peters (1936) American writer and publisher

"And the beat goes on", http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/09/DD158147.DTL San Francisco Chronicle, 2003-06-09.
2000s

People , Books , Thinking , Freedom

“Ralph Nader’s the guy. If Ralph Nader had become president, we would not have had the problems. Everything he says is correct. He said, “Don’t tax food. Tax the stock market. Every time somebody trades stock, put another tax on it…" Every time you trade, they take a service fee, five bucks or something. That’s bullshit. The government should get it and give it to me while I live in my refrigerator box. I don’t mean me, I mean us undergrounds. Nader was right on. Everything he said was right on and the media treated him like a clown. The media treated him worse than they treat Troma.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

CraveOnline http://www.craveonline.com/film/articles/507781-exclusive-cannes-interview-lloyd-kaufman-on-nuke-em-high May 28, 2013
2013

Food , Guy , Problem , Time

“Gramsci's remarks are rich and stimulating, but in the last analysis they follow the classical Marxist pattern of analysing religion. Ernst Bloch was the first Marxist author who radically changed the theoretical framework—without abandoning the Marxist and revolutionary perspective. In a similar way to Engels, he distinguished two socially opposed currents: on one side the theocratic religion of the official churches, opium of the people, a mystifying apparatus at the service of the powerful; on the other the underground, subversive and heretical religion of the Albigensians, the Hussites, Joachim di Fiori, Thomas Münzer, Franz von Baader, Wilhelm Weitling and Leo Tolstoy.”

Michael Löwy (1938) French sociologist

Source: The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1996), p. 15 http://books.google.com/books?id=gyOHaZFpvL8C&pg=PA15

People , Religion , Way , Change

“The Baghdad regime is the first oil-producing government to opt for 100-per-cent nationalisation, a process completed with the acquisition of foreign assets in Basrah last December. It was the first to call for the use of oil as a political weapon against Israel and her backers. It gives strong economic and political support to the ‘Rejection Front’ Palestinians who oppose Arafat’s conciliation and are currently trying to outface the Syrians in Beirut. And it has a leader — Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1976-04-02
Iraq Flexes Arab Muscle
New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/200707050056
1970s

Support , Strong

“This is what you should do: Go to your record store and buy all the GG ALLIN recordings you can find. If they dont have any in stock, tell them to order some. If they refuse, then do what you have to do. Call radio stations and demand GG Allin. Spray paint "GG ALLIN" everywhere. Make them aware that the disease and the Scumfuc tradition is still spreading. Write "GG ALLIN" on all your dollar bills. Any bills you have. People do not throw money away, so it would be a free way to get the message out. You must do it every day of your life. We must live for the Rock 'N' Roll underground. It CAN be dark and dangerous again. It CAN be threatning to our society as it was meant to be. IT MUST BE UNCOMPROMISING. And with me as your leader, it will happen. I am ready to lead you, my allies, into the real Rock 'N' Roll underground. Let's get started.”

GG Allin (1956–1993) American singer-songwriter

GG Allin: GG Allin Mission Statement http://ggallinonline.com/mission.php, GG Allin Online.com, 1991. GG Allin Mission Statement read March 1, 2010.

Life , Money , People , Disease

“We are going for the enemy's fortifications. Artillery is doing its share in every phase of the battle. Automatic weapons are so extensively used to-day that we cannot possibly limit our operation to silencing enemy gun emplacements. Drive them underground? No, we have to wipe them out! The artillerymen can no longer be guided merely by orders for the infantry. It is waging battle in its own right.”

Leonid Govorov (1897–1955) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "The Dynamics of Nationalism: Readings in Its Meaning and Development" - by Louis Leo Snyder - Political Science - 1964 - Page 219

Silence

“When I joined City Lights in 1971 and started working with Lawrence, it was clear that it had been very much a center of protest, for people with revolutionary ideas and people who wanted to change society. And when I first began working at the little editorial office up on Filbert and Grant, people that Lawrence had known through the whole decade of the '60s were dropping in all the time, like Paul Krassner, Tim Leary, people who were working with underground presses and trying to provide an alternative to mainstream media. This was a period of persecution, and FBI infiltration of those presses.”

Nancy Peters (1936) American writer and publisher

"And the beat goes on", http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/09/DD158147.DTL San Francisco Chronicle, 2003-06-09.
2000s

People , Idea , Light , Change

“If I weren't an actress playing a socialite, I'd have lavender hair, wear crappy vintage clothes and have tattoos. I'd be some kind of crazy lawless rebel - an alternative underground riot girl.”

Megan Mullally (1958) American actress

Attributed

Girl , Tattoo , Clothes

“Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 15: In the Sierra Foot-Hills

Beauty , Way , Mountain , Learning

“It's good to be sent back to the underground. There's always a good side to bad things and the good side to this is that at least everyone has to go back down.”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

Joe Strummer: Putting a Scare into he Hearts of All Things Corporate (2002)

“Don't want to discuss it, I think it's time for a change.
You may get disgusted, some think that I'm strange
In that case I'll go underground, get some heavy rest
Never have to worry, about what is worst and what is best.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Domino
Song lyrics, His Band and the Street Choir (1970)

Thinking , Change , Time

“Some leaders of denominations are not of the Bride of Christ. They are leaders in a Church in which many have long since betrayed the Master. When they meet someone of the Underground Church, a martyr, they look at him strangely.”

Richard Wurmbrand (1909–2001) Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent

Source: Tortured For Christ (1967), p. 82.

Christ

“[W]atching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

National Secruity Speech, American Enterprise Institute http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124267920788831733.html (21 May 2009)
2000s, 2009

Housing , Country

“I got very frustrated when I was reading so-called classic books or films, or listening to underground music which is trying to tell you something. it´s all nonsense, and it´s disillusioning. So it would be a paradox for me to then decide I´m going to communicate something.”

Robert Smith (musician) (1959) English singer, songwriter and musician

Sounds, August 24, 1985

Books , Music , Communication , Reading

“It is an irony of fate (or a triumph of folly) that Hamas was created, in fact, with the help of Israel itself. Much as the Americans created the al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden in order to fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, Israel supported the Islamic movement in the occupied territories as a counterweight to the PLO. The assumption was that pious Muslims would spend their time praying in the mosques and would not support the secular PLO, which was then considered the arch-enemy. But when the first intifada broke out at the end of 1987, the Islamists organized as Hamas (the Arabic initials of "Islamic Resistance Movement") and quickly became the most efficient underground fighting organization. However, the Security Service started to act against them only after a whole year of the intifada had passed.”

Uri Avnery (1923–2018) Israeli writer

Red Herring (June 21, 2005)

Fate , Support , Time , Help

“What a curious picture it is to find man, homo sapiens, of divine origin, we are told, seriously considering going underground to escape the consequences of his own folly. With a little wisdom and foresight, surely it is not yet necessary to forsake life in the fresh air and in the warmth of the sunlight. What a paradox if our own cleverness in science should force us to live underground with the moles.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

Address to the Foreign Policy Association, New York City (October 20, 1945), in Fulbright of Arkansas: The Public Positions of a Private Thinker (1963)

Life , Wisdom , Science

“My job was to keep the house clean, get the children off to school, help the cook-housekeeper, and serve at table. The house was much more perfect than the sort of gilt-bordered Christmas-card-Heaven that a crooked-nosed woman would sacrifice everything to attain in the next world: it was an all-electric house, with machines being plugged in and started up all day long; there was no such thing as a fire; heat came from hot-springs underground, and the glowing embers in the fireplace were made of glass.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Children , World , School , Spring

“I have spent 11 horrific years in solitary confinement in a 6-square-meter dungeon three floors underground without sunlight or fresh air. But I endured my hardships because I was merely living my convictions.”

Samir Geagea (1952) Lebanese politician and war lord

On his release from prison, quoted in "Samir, Sitrida Geagea Airborne for Month-Long Recuperation Abroad" at Lebanese Forces.com (26 July 2005) http://www.lebaneseforces.com/2005_07_01_archive.asp

“I hate extremes of any kind. Communism and the National Front both seek the domination of the state over the individual. They both, I believe crush the right of the individual. To me, therefore, they are parties of a similar kind. All my life I have stood against banning Communism or other extremist organisations because, if you do that, they go underground and it gives them an excitement that they don't get if they are allowed to pursue their policies openly. We'll beat them into the ground on argument… The National Front is a Socialist Front.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Interview for Hornsey Journal (21 April 1978) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=103662
Leader of the Opposition

Life , Hate , Communication

“America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took — quite literally — the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic?”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"James Tate and American Surrealism," BBC Radio 3, published in Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

Men , Children , Dreams , Animals

“Of course, of course. Even though if it wasn’t for what happened previously, all the success we had previously, it’s not like you can come straight from an underground record to Oscar status and be recognised by the people at the Academy. Me and Paul had a conversation about this actually when I got out of jail. I congratulated him because I came out like the day before it came on and I was like: ‘I’m proud of you’. And he told me: ‘Well don’t be proud of me because we couldn’t have did it without all the stuff you did’.”

Lord Infamous (1975–2013) American rapper

Interview whit Lord Infamous - RIP - March 2009 https://medium.com/@daveyboysmith/interview-with-lord-infamous-rip-march-30th-2009-94dbfc2f0d9b

People , Success

“We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who marches up and down beneath our window to guarantee our security while we eat our luxurious dinner, or look at the new piece at the theater, or that we are unaware of the existence of the soldiers who will make their appearance with guns and cartridges directly our property is attacked.
We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not policeman and soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.
And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fetes and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do not know that the men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that they do not like working underground, in the water, or in the stifling heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter 12

Men , Hunger , Pleasure , Imagination

“As someday it may happen that a victim must be found
I've got a little list, I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed—who never would be missed!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Song, "As someday it may happen".
The Mikado (1885)

“Contemplating such questions as the dialectical relations between being and becoming has inspired and strengthened my beliefs. You are not hearing here some random ideas of a passionate student or a distressed prisoner, but reflections rooted in the experience of a woman physicist who happens to have also advocated for equal rights and human rights, and who as a result was subjected to threats, deprivation, arrests, continuous prosecutions, and finally sentenced to a total of 23 years of imprisonment, 16 years of which has to be served based on the ruling laws in Iran. The harsh treatment and excessive sentence to which I have been subjected were not due to any underground violent or terrorist activity on my part, but– as admitted by the judges of this very system–because of my insistence on the rights of civil society and of human rights. My case, then, clearly portrays the unjust, brutal and illegal practices of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Narges Mohammadi (1972) Iranian human rights activist

Letter Accepting 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prizefrom (2018)

Law , Idea , Question , Passion

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")

To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.

Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.

The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.

Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.

But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money , Family , Way , Feeling

“[On modern art] True psychos stand alone. The only pioneers are those who give voices to the ugliest corridors of their unconscious without fear of censure from any quarter. The acts that ordinary of people commit behind closed doors are beyond the ken of any performance artist. Humans' innate weirdness is far more threating and entertaining than anything the professional shock mavens could conjure. I boggle your conception of a world split between cognoscenti and squares. I subvert the subversive and bury the underground under six feet of its own hypocritical manure. I perform unsolicited tattooing, body-piercing, and ritual scarification upon you. Give vent to your sickest fantasies, but don't call it art. Cornhole Barbara Bush, but only if you want to. Sketch your astrological chart with your own feces, but only if it feels good. If you want to do something truly radical, kill yourself. We'll have one less reader, but the world will be a better place.”

Jim Goad (1961) Author, publisher

ANSWER Me!

People , World , Fear , Art

“Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book III, Ch. 6.

Fear

“In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men.”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), p. 25

Men , World , Communication

“The difficult decisions first began in December 1964, when I refused to join a Progress Labor Party group preparing to go ‘underground.’ They ended with the most difficult choice—to leave the movement silently, quietly, as so many other had done before, or to risk the censure of those who had once been my friends and tell of the personal experience, political truths, and illegal activities that forced me to ‘split.’ The friends who were no longer friendly, the attempts at personal slander, the chorus that now sang out my name as the most dangerous enemy of all, the attempts to isolate me—all were expected. But the contemptuous and defamatory quality of the attacks were not, and the only thing one can say is that the Old and New Left have this something in common—they have no scruples when it comes to one who sways from their prescribed faith.”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 3

Truth , Faith , Decision , Personality

“My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist in pre-war Paris
Smuggling bombs for the underground.
And she met my father at a fete in Aix-en-Provence;
He was disguised as a Russian cadet in the employ of the Axis.”

Colin Meloy (1974) American musician

My Mother was a Chinese Trapeze Artist (5 Songs - 2001)
Lyrics

War

“Amerika is just another Latin dictatorship. Those who have doubts should try the minimal experience of organizing a large rock festival in their state, sleeping on some beach in the summer or wearing a flag shirt. Ask the blacks what it's been like living under racism and you'll get a taste of the future we face. As the repression increases so will the underground - deadly groups of stoned revolutionaries sneaking around at night and balling all day.”

Abbie Hoffman book Steal This Book

Steal This Book (1971)

Sleep , Future , Summer , Night

“When your dreams tire, they go underground and out of kindness that's where they stay.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Libby Houston, in the poem "Gold" in Necessity (1988).
Misattributed

Dreams

“Concrete presents, besides a coefficient of thermal expansion, a coefficient of hygroscopic dilation which is more appreciable. While concrete is kept wet… it expands; and as it dries, it contracts, in inverse proportion to the hygroscopic degree of the ambient air. …The shrinkage …will vary with the porosity of the concrete and with the thickness used in the structural member. …Shrinkage is much greater in structures consisting of thin elements subjected to intemperateness of dry climate, and disappears or becomes negligible in underground structures”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

e.g., foundations
Philosophy of Structures (1958)

“Sin must be called by its name. Communism is one of the most dangerous sins in the world today. Every gospel that does not denounce it is not the pure gospel. The Underground Church denounces it, risking liberty and life. The less have we to be silent in the West.”

Richard Wurmbrand (1909–2001) Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent

Source: Tortured For Christ (1967), p. 75.

Life , World , Communication

“The only platform from which public exposures can be made is an all-Russian newspaper. "Without a political organ, a political movement deserving that name is inconceivable in modern Europe."In this connection Russia must undoubtedly by included in modern Europe. The press has long ago become a power in our country, otherwise the government would not spend tens of thousands of rubles to bribe it, and to subsidize the Katkovs and Meshcherskys. And it is no novelty in autocratic Russia for the underground press to break through the wall of sponsorship and compel the legal and conservative press to speak openly of it.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section E, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

Country

“Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, "normal," chronic state--where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised--to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized. Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 106-7

Hate , Religion , Way , Feeling

“Jung believed that he was proceeding scientifically, but most Freudians remain convinced that he was inventing his own underground realm, rather as Tolkien invented Middle Earth. There is at least an element of truth in this view.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: C. G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld (1984), p. 126

Truth

“When the rains have fallen down
We can live our lives underground
No recollection of before
We'll make our own history
Fulfill our destiny
For sure, we can save humanity”

D. S. Bradford (1982) musician

A Call To The Stars II: A Home In The Sky https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/D-S-Bradford/A-Call-to-the-Stars-Ii-A-Home-in-the-Sky, verse 1
A Call To The Stars II: A Home In The Sky (2016)

History

“I feel like I was particularly impressed by Richard Corben's work. But in general I would not say the underground made that big of an impression except for Corben… His science-fiction stories, those almost primitive black and white comics he did back then. I was very struck by the visceral punch they had, by the unusual artistic point of view. And also by the unabashed exaggeration. It's as if you wanted a woman to have big breasts, you drew it. There was something just so joyously excessive and erotic about his stuff, that I just ate it up.|Frank Miller }}”

Richard Corben (1940) American illustrator

Feeling , Science

“There are several generations of Silicon Valley CEOs who "pay-it-forward." It’s an understood, underground thing you don’t talk about. You give back to younger founders and entrepreneurs without asking for anything. The goal is to pass on what we learned to make our startup ecosystem better.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Interview with Steve Blank (2013)

Learning

“I follow the works of Iranian artists even now, sometimes in Paris or in New York and I am happy Iranian artists are still great. Whether they are men or women, they have always been great. Despite all the pressure and censorship inside the country, they haven't been able to stop the creativity of our artists. Some have to work underground, like in cinema, and sometimes their work has political messages, but the number of our artists now has definitely grown in comparison to the past.”

Farah Pahlavi (1938) Empress of Iran

Former queen of Iran on assembling Tehran's art collection http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/01/queen-iran-art-collection, The Guardian, (August 1, 2012).
Interviews

Women , Men , Past , Country

“Follow the light that glows
Through your bedroom window,
Tonight, the fading twilight.
There's a hollow deep in the woods,
Where you know you're crazy to go,
Not even meant to know there are…
Pictures in the dark, I see all around,
Voices calling underground;
And I'm watching the stars since the world was found…
One, two, three…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Collection (2002)

World , Star , Light

“My views on abortion come from my mom. She was a nurse in surgery for her entire adult life, and used to tell me how terrible it was before Roe vs. Wade—when back-alley abortions often placed the woman's life in danger. Today, some people live under a false premise that, if the government makes something illegal, it will go away. But then the illegal activity is simply controlled by an underground or criminal element. And, in the case of abortion, you will not receive the safety and precautions necessary.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 10 (p. 182)

Life , People , Moms , Falseness

“FBI agents have told some parents that their sons can be returned. This is not true. Rumours have been circulated by U. S. authorities because there is no other way the government can keep young Americans from coming. One recent AP wire had it that 71 "fugitive warrants" had been issued for young Americans in Canada. The story implied that the warrants were valid in Canada. They were not; they cannot be. … Public officials, amateur draft counsellors, lawyers who do not specialize in draft work, and, unfortunately, the "underground" press are notorious sources of misinformation. Read this handbook again and again, and contact a Canadian anti-draft programme if need be.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Page 6.
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada (1968)

Way , Parent , Reading

“Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. … But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

"Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher'" http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/exhibits/james/psychical/7_8.cfm, in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909), p. 589
Often (mis)quoted as: "We are like islands in the sea; separate on the surface but connected in the deep", or: "Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground."
1900s

Tree , Sea

“I was motivated not so much by belief, as by loyalty to my Pagan ancestors, who were loyal to their Gods, worshiping underground, always resisting, and who punctuate our history.”

Christopher Gérard (1962)

Pagan Power in Modern Europe (1999)

God , History , Motivation , Loyalty

“I was totally amazed. This little home made underground comix thing was turning into a business before my eyes. It went from us going around Haight Street trying to sell these things we had folded and stapled ourselves to suddenly being a business with distributors, lawyers, contracts, and money talk. … The whole thing began to take on a heaviness that I believe had a negative effect on my work. I was only twenty-five years old when all this happened. It was a case of "too much too soon," I think. I became acutely self-conscious about what I was doing. Was I now a "spokesman" for the hippies or what? I had no idea how to handle my new position in society! … Take Keep On Truckin'… for example. Keep on Truckin'… is the curse of my life. This stupid little cartoon caught on hugely. … I didn't want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture! I didn't want to do 'shtick'—the thing Lenny Bruce warned against. That's when I started to let out all my perverse sex fantasies. It was the only way out of being "America's Best Loved Hippie Cartoonist."”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 163

Love , Life , Money , Stupidity

“Opening my first Donald Duck comic book felt like seeing the daylight again for someone who had been trapped underground by a mine-disaster for many days. I squinted cautiously because my eyes hadn't gotten used to the dazzlingly bright sun of Duckburg yet, and I greedily sucked the fresh breeze into my dusty lungs that came drifting over from Uncle Scrooge's money bin. I was back home again, in a decent world where one could get flattened by steam-rollers and perforated by bullets without serious harm. A world in which people still looked proper, with yellow beaks or black knobs instead of noses. And it was here that I met the man who would forever change my life - Donald Duck.”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Memories of Duckburg, http://www.helnwein.com/texte/helnweintexts/artikel_398.html, Zeit Magazin, Hamburg, 1989

Life , Money , People , Books

“We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial root, adventitious growths and rhizomes.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

Nous sommes fatigués de l'arbre. Nous ne devons plus croire aux arbres, aux racines ni aux radicelles. Nous en avons trop souffert. Toute la culture arborescente est fondée sur eux, de la biologie à la linguistique. Au contraire, rien n'est beau, rien n'est amoureux, rien n'est politique, sauf les tiges souterraines et les racines aériennes, l'adventice et le rhizome.
from A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 15

Love , Beauty , Tree , Suffering

“The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 18, Section I, p. 199

Family

“Roecker seems to have been as inspired by Todd Haynes's legendary underground film "Superstar" -- in which he told Karen Carpenter's life story with surprising tenderness using Barbie dolls and a bootlegged soundtrack -- as by the stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen and the "Frosty the Snowman" cartoon.”

John Roecker (1966) American film director

Ann Hornaday — quoted in The Washington Post, The Washington Post Company, One Forgettable 'Freak' Show, January 27, 2006, Ann, Hornaday http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012600739.html,
About

Life , Animals

“In his effort toward revivification of this sense [the sense for great art], the modern artist has not infrequently retired into himself; he has accepted isolation or even alienation. … Sometimes the good has to go underground. … The “revolutionary” artist … has had the aim of saving himself from the surrounding forces of sentimentality and vulgarity. … It is impossible to make a deal with these forces, and we should not be surprised if in striking back the artist has done so in ways even intended to be offensive. He has sometimes shown defiance and contempt toward those who would deny his level of seriousness.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” pp. 30-31.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Art , Way , Sense , Effort

“GG Allin: I got to tell you one thing that is really bothering me. I went to prison for two years for what I did to a girl and she did the same thing to me but because she was a girl they let her of and put me in prison because she was the weaker sex. Now if women want equal rights they got to do equal time. Ok, I cut her, I burned her, I drank her blood but she also did the same to me. It was consexual agreement but in the courtroom they said that I was to blame because I'm GG Allin, I'm the king of the underground. They need to nail me to a cross.”

GG Allin (1956–1993) American singer-songwriter

GG Allin on The Jerry Springer Show, May 5. 1993.
On The Jerry Springer Show

Women , Sex , Girl , Time

“Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.”

John Pudney (1909–1977) British writer

For Johnny.

Sleep , Despair

“The proletariat thus shared its dictatorship with nobody. As to the question of the "majority", this never troubled Lenin much. In an article "Constitutional Illusions" (Aug. 1917; Works, vol. 25, p. 201) he wrote: "in time of revolution it is not enough to ascertain the ‘ will of the majority’ – you must prove to be stronger at the decisive moment and at the decisive place; you must win … We have seen innumerable examples of the better organized, more politically conscious and better armed minority forcing its will upon the majority and defeating it." (pg. 503) Trotsky, however, answers questions [in The Defence of Terrorism] that Lenin evaded or ignored. "Where is your guarantee, certain wise men ask us, that it is just your party that expresses the interests of historical development? Destroying or driving underground the other parties, you have thereby prevented their political competition with you, and consequently you have deprived yourselves of the possibility of testing your line of action." Trotsky replies: "This idea is dictated by a purely liberal conception of the course of the revolution. In a period in which all antagonisms assume an open character; and the political struggle swiftly passes into a civil war, the ruling party has sufficient material standard by which to test its line of action, without the possible circulation of Menshevik papers. Noske crushes the Communists, but they grow. We have suppressed the Mensheviks and the S. R. s [Socialist Republics] … and they have disappeared. This criterion is sufficient for us" (p. 101). This is one of the most enlightening theoretical formulations of Bolshevism, from which it appears that the "rightness" of a historical movement or a state is to be judged by whether its use of violence is successful. Noske did not succeed in crushing the German Communists, but Hitler did; it would thus follow from Trotsky’ s rule that Hitler "expressed the interests of historical development". Stalin liquidated the Trotskyists in Russia, and they disappeared – so evidently Stalin, and not Trotsky, stood for historical progress.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 510
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Men , War , Idea , Question

“Malema: So these popcorn and mushrooming political parties in Zimbabwe, they will never find friendship in us. They can insult us here from air-conditioned offices of Sandton, we are unshaken. They must stop shouting at us, they must go and fight with their battle in Zimbabwe and win. Even if they've got ground and they are formed on the basis of solid ground in Zim, why are they speaking in Sandton and not Mashonaland or Matabeleland? … Let them go back and go and fight there. Even when the ANC was underground in exile, we had our internal underground forces fighting for freedom.
Fisher: You live in Sandton.
Malema: And we have never spoken from … exile. Let me tell you before you are tjatjarag [i. e. chatty]. This is a building of a revolutionary party, and you know nothing about the revolution.
Fisher: So, so they are not welcome in Sandton but you are?
Malema: So here you behave or else you jump. [Fisher and others laugh. ] Don't laugh.
Fisher: You're joking.
Malema: Chief, can you get security to remove this thing here. If you are not going to behave … call security to take you out. This is not a news room this. This is a revolutionary house. And you don't come here with that tendency. Don't come here with that white tendency, not here. … If you've got a tendency of undermining blacks even while you work, you are in a wrong place …
Fisher: That's rubbish.
Malema: … and you can go out!
Fisher: Absolutely rubbish.
Malema: Rubbish is what you have covered in that trouser. … You are a small boy, you can't do anything. … Bastard! Go out! You bloody agent! … So we think that we need to ensure that we encourage Zanu PF comrades to engage in peaceful means.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

Outburst against reporter Jonah Fisher at Luthuli House on 8 April 2010, while president of the ANC youth league and after his return from Zimbabwe, ANC's Julius Malema lashes out at 'misbehaving' BBC journalist https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/08/anc-julius-malema-bbc-journalist (8 April 2010)

Friendship , Peace , Boy , Thinking

“Now he saw the problem with great clarity. If he lived here, life would be pleasant and safe. But it would also be predictable. A child could be born here, grow up here, die here, without ever experiencing the excitement of discovery. Why did Dona question him endlessly about his life in the burrow and his journey to the country of the ants? Because for her, it represented a world that was dangerous and full of fascinating possibilities. For the children of this underground city, life was a matter of repetition, of habit. And this, he suddenly realized, was the heart of the problem. Habit. Habit was a stifling, warm blanket that threatened you with suffocation and lulled the mind into a state of perpetual nagging dissatisfaction. Habit meant the inability to escape from yourself, to change and develop…”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Spider World: The Desert (1987), pp. 132-133

Life , Children , World , Question

“We'll all turn black
So who's to know?
As a matter of fact,
Color, creed and breed must go.
There will be no light,
So there can be no sight.
And you'll judge your fellow man;
Understand bout what is right.
A million music, a million sound
There's neutral thoughts
For the underground.”

Curtis Mayfield (1942–1999) American singer, songwriter, and record producer

Underground, from Roots (1971).
Song lyrics

Music , Color , Understanding , Light