James Baldwin 

“Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.”

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

George Carlin

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

“Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.”

Joan Didion

“We tell each other stories in order to live.”

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

“The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.”

Edmund White

“In America, the best way to bury a secret is to publish it.”

“Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis.”

“The French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is so sharp, so sure, that the foreigner (especially someone from chaotic, confused America) is quickly seduced into believing that if he can only become a Parisian he will at last master the art of living.”

Toni Morrison

“The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.”

“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.”

“I tell my students, When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

Lenny Bruce

“Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.’”

“Great comics throughout literature have always disguised by comedy, through laughter, through jokes, an underlying theme which is very serious, and perhaps needs laughter because it is also painful.”

“You can't put tits and ass on the marquee! Why not? Because it's dirty and vulgar, that's why not! Titties are dirty and vulgar? Okay, we'll compromise. How about Latin? Gluteus maximus, pectoralis majors nightly. That's alright, that's clean, class with ass, I'll buy it. Clean to you, schmuck, but dirty to the Latins!”

Bob Dylan

Wealth is a filthy rag
So erotic so unpatriotic
So wrapped up in the American flag

“What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.”

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

Prince

Hey, look me over
Tell me, do you like what you see?
Hey, I ain’t got no money
But, honey, I’m rich on personality

Aristocrats on a mountain climb
Making money, losing time
Communism is just a word
But if the government turn over
It’ll be the only word that's heard

Just when you think you’ve got more than enough
That’s when it all up and flies away
That’s when you find out that you're better off
Making sure your soul’s alright
‘Cause money didn’t matter yesterday
And it sure don’t matter tonight

Kurt Vonnegut

“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost effective.”

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.”

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. ... Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

“I’ll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will.”

“I don’t get a sense of American pride. I just get a sense that everyone is here, battling the same thing—that around the world everybody’s after the same thing, just some minor piece of happiness each day.”

“Political films can be like eating your vegetables. There are many exceptions of great films that are political; however, right now the only thing I want to see is a story that I can relate to. And the only thing that matters is the emotional. The emotional comes from the story of a family. It comes from the way we love and hate.”

bell hooks

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.”

“Marginality is much more than a site of deprivation. In fact, I was saying just the opposite: that it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.”

“Fame is fun, money is useful, celebrity can be exciting, but finally life is about optimal well-being and how we achieve that in dominator culture, in a greedy culture, in a culture that uses so much of the world’s resources. How do men and women, boys and girls, live lives of compassion, justice and love?”

Billie Joe Armstrong

Oh, dream, America, dream
I can’t even sleep from the light’s early dawn
Oh, scream, America, scream
Believe what you see from heroes and cons

Don’t wanna be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
It’s calling out to idiot America

Hear the drum poundin’ out of time
Another protester has crossed the line
To find the money’s on the other side
Can I get another Amen?
There’s a flag wrapped around a score of men
A gag, a plastic bag on a monument

David Wojnarowicz

“If silence equals death, then art equals language equals life.”

“It is exhausting living in a population where people don’t speak up if what they witness doesn’t directly threaten them.”

“I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I’m amazed we’re not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.”

Dolly Parton

“I always count my blessings more than I count my money. I don’t work for money, never did.”

Don’t get me started on politics / Now how are we to live in a world like this / Greedy politicians present and past / They wouldn't know the truth if it bit ‘em in the ass

Workin’ nine to five, what a way to make a livin’ / Barely getting’ by, it's all takin’ and no givin’ / They just use your mind and they never give you credit / It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it / … / It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it / And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet

Rick Rubin

“In terms of priority, inspiration comes first. You come next. The audience comes last.”

“If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of a craftsman. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of the artist.”

“Rules direct us to average behaviors. If we’re aiming to create works that are exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to. The goal is not to fit in. If anything, it’s to amplify the differences, what doesn’t fit, the special characteristics unique to how you see the world. Instead of sounding like others, value your own voice. Develop it.”

Gore Vidal

“The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.”

“I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.”

“The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.”

Mark Twain

“Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”

“How unfortunate and how narrowing a thing it is for a man to have wealth who makes a god of it instead of a servant.”

“What is the chief end of man?—to get rich. In what way?—dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one only and true? Money is God. God and Greenbacks and Stock—father, son, and the ghost of same—three persons in one; these are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.”

Nina Simone

You don’t have to live next to me
Just give me my equality

Southern trees
Bearing strange fruit
Blood on the leaves
And blood at the roots
Black bodies
Swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’
From the poplar trees

“I am just one of the people who is sick of the social order, sick of the establishment, sick to my soul of it all. To me, America’s society is nothing but a cancer, and it must be exposed before it can be cured. I am not the doctor to cure it. All I can do is expose the sickness.”

Shepard Fairey

“Street art, of course, is political, because it’s illegal, so the very act of doing it is an act of defiance.”

“I want to be proud of this country, but when aspects of our policy don’t align with my ethics, I want to protest them and try to change them.”

“I think that the influence of people with power and money to distort democracy and have their interests served before the rest of the population is the biggest problem. That is caused by two things: campaign finance and the way that’s structured, and by the Citizen’s United supreme court decision. So those two things are keeping democracy from working right.”

Kurt Cobain

“I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.”

“They laugh at me because I’m different; I laugh at them because they’re all the same.”

“I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn’t identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music. They just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago, but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.”

Frank Zappa

“The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced.”

“I think that any artistic decision that is based on whether or not you are going to make money is not really an artistic decision. It is a business decision.”

You can’t run a country
By a book of religion
Not by a heap
Or a lump or a smidgeon
Of foolish rules
Of ancient date
Designed to make
You all feel great
While you fold, spindle
And mutilate
Those unbelievers
From a neighboring state

Christopher Hitchens

“Nobody is more covetous and greedy than those who have far too much.”

“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”

“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.”

Jane Fonda

“To be a revolutionary you have to be a human being. You have to care about people who have no power.”

“All I know is that despite the fact that I am one of the people who benefit from a capitalist society, I find that any system which exploits other people cannot and should not exist.”

“The difference with actors is that we are paid to become all the people inside us and to bring into us all the people we may have met along the way. Thus we remain instinctively aware of, unsettled by, curious about, empathetic toward, and eager to display all those potential beings we carry.”

Andy Warhol

“Buying is much more American than thinking.”

“An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he—for some reason—thinks it would be a good idea to give them.”

“Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see … pieced together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.”

Adam Yauch

“It’s pretty easy to see that wealth doesn’t really equal happiness.”

Now you can shuffle numbers but facts is facts
So many billionaires while so many lacks
So before the poor decide to react
Well, come on party people, share up your stacks

The Bodhisattva path is one of power and strength
A strength from within to go the length
Seeing others are as important as myself
I strive for a happiness of mental wealth
With the interconnectedness that we share as one
Every action that we take affects everyone
So in deciding for what a situation calls
There is a path for the good for all

Viola Davis

“Success pales in comparison to healing.”

“I learned the hard way that when there are underlying issues, money does nothing. In fact, money exacerbates the problem because it takes away the individual’s ability to be held accountable.”

“There’s an unspoken message that the only stories worth telling are the stories that end up in history books. This is not true. Every story matters. My father’s story matters. We are all worthy of telling our stories and having them heard. We all need to be seen and honored in the same way that we all need to breathe.”

Jack Kerouac

“This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.”

“He doesn't need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this.”

“Vanity of vanities … all is vanity. You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you die; and the name of the grave is ‘success’, the name of that grave is hullabullo boom boom horseshit.”

Lily Tomlin

“If people couldn’t profit from war, I don’t think there would be war.”

“There are too many people that make so much money at the cost of lives of other humans and for no reason but to make the money.”

“Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then—we elected them.”

David Letterman

“I believe I have voted for both Democrats and Republicans. Am I either one? Absolutely not. Ladies and gentlemen, I am an American.”

“I have found that the only thing that does bring you happiness is doing something good for somebody who is incapable of doing it for themselves.”

“We all see where this is going, correct? It’s managed media, and it’s no good. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. And you can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian—a criminal administration in the Oval Office. That’s just not how this works.”

George Saunders

“She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.”

“There’s this de facto assumption that for something to have value, it has to be economically self-supporting—which imposes a very low ceiling on a culture.”

“A guy has a crazy notion different from your crazy notion, you pat him on the back and say, Hey pal, nice crazy notion, let's go have a beer. America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamorous reasonable voice.”