What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

I’m not a sheep.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

I don’t want followers.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Please don’t ask me to do that which I’ve just said I’m not going to do, because you’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.

I’m just an individual who doesn’t feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I’m working for me.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.

I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

Let’s embrace being not normal!

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

I don’t like being told what to do and kissing you-know-what to get up the corporate ladder.

What someone else does or doesn’t do has no effect on me and what I do.

Yes, I’m still going to misbehave!

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.

In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I’m concerned, that part is Greg’s for life. I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused.

Under Clinton, the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting ‚All the Gods are bastards.‘

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

Like Frank Sinatra, I’m doing it my way.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Most young people were getting jobs in big companies, becoming company men. I wanted to be individual.

When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

When we started to do punk, we put all of these things together to create the look of an urban guerrilla – a rebel.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

What, man, defy the devil. Consider, he’s an enemy to mankind.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

Mine is better than ours.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

I’ve always kinda been a little outcast myself, a little oddball, doin‘ my thing, my own way. And it’s been hard for me to, to be accepted, certainly in the early years of my life.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

When everybody looks at our generation of kids, they always call us the misfits – you know, like we just don’t give a damn.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.

I don’t fight in chase of an individual. I hear this sometimes where fighters work their whole careers to reach a matchup with a certain individual. I do not think in that way.

You pay a certain penalty for going your own way. A lot of people think you’re nuts, and you’re not as popular with girls as you should be.

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.