Nina Simone Quotes

Stop talking about the way things are, unless you like them.

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

As soon as a norm is established, people start questioning it, which is probably a good thing in the end.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

Foolish people follow the system, get caught up in media news, what the government wants you to believe and all the higher powers want you to believe, and go down the same path as all the sheep in the cattle market.

America needs to be challenged.

No system disappears quickly because habits live on.

Some people like to reform everything they can get their hands on. Others want to fold away and worship whatever is presented to them by the caprice of history.

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

The mainstream is always under attack.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.

We've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.

People are so brainwashed by the rules that they don't know what really matters.

I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth.

There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.

We smile at the women who are eagerly following the fashions in dress whilst we are as eagerly following the fashions in thought.

most Americans are in deep awe of things-as-they-are. Even with everything this obviously out of control, they still tell themselves that those in authority must know what they are doing, and must be describing our condition to us as it really is; they still take it for granted that somehow what is, what is done, must make sense, can't really be insane. These assumptions exercise a tyranny over their minds.

There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.