The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary

Isn’t it singular that no one ever goes to jail for waging wars, let alone advocating them? But the jails are filled with those who want peace. Not to kill is to be a criminal. They put you right into jail if all you do is ask them to leave you alone. Exercising the right to live is a violation of law. (61)

[My mother] points out that neither Gandhi nor Thoreau would have asked for amnesty. I admit I haven’t read them. But Gandhi had no Gandhi to read and Thoreau hadn’t read Thoreau. They had to reach their own conclusions and so will I. (29)

I can assure you that the Columbia action cannot be dismissed as an overgrown panty raid, a manifestation of the vernal urge. It lasted too long; participants endured hardship, and worse, boredom, conditions through which collegiate fetishistic folly could never sustain itself. (150)

The moderator [...]said that what [adults] are doing today is paying the penalty for years of permissiveness, which is true, if permissiveness means raising kids to think and not obey any authority that happens to come stomping along.
All concurred that we students “should be busy studying to be leaders instead of carping about things.” (57-58)

In America you shouldn’t have to worry about police busting into your apartment and beating you up. I specifically remember seeing a TV show around thirteen years ago about an immigrant couple who still had their old country fears and thought the mailman was a cop coming to take them away. They weren’t confused; they were just ahead of their time. (79)

Most people agree that there are good cops and bad. But everybody assumes that there have to be cops, that there always have been. I have no plan for abolishing police forces, but I do think people should consider that police are not the most natural thing in the world [...]It seems strange to me that a few men should be taken from the community and given the job of watching out for it. […H]e’s got his club and his gun and everybody seems to think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. (140)

Commenting on the importance of student opinion to the administration, Professor Deane declared, “Whether the students vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on an issue is like telling me they like strawberries.” (121)

Think twice before you pour your stinking bloody money into more weapons because people are hungry and we won’t let you. We need good schools and houses for people to live in and it could be done and we’re going to make this country do it. (94)

Social progress is slow. It’s practically nonexistent. We’re about where we were 10,000 years ago. But you have to try to make it go fast so that it will go slow at all. (102)

But sadness is not despair so long as you can get angry. And we have become angry at Columbia. Not having despaired, we are able to see things that need to be fought, and we fight. We have fought, we are fighting, we will fight. (6)

There used to be a dream for America. You know, the American dream? America was going to be different. Free. Good. Free and good. Of course they blew it right away. As soon as the Puritans came over they set up religious laws. But at least they clung to the dream. Until now. Now no one hopes for America to be different. I guess it was the dream that ruined the dream. People became convinced it was true, so they never made it true. People think the U.S.A. (a great-sounding, nice, informal name) is special, so we can do anything and it’s okay (an American expression). People should wake up and dream again. (64)

'My friends and I became preoccupied with the common nostalgic assertion that "these are the best years of your lives." We could accept the fact that the college years are exhausting, confusing, boring, troubled, frustrating, and meaningless—that we could take in stride; we'd seen hard times before. But that everything subsequent would be worse was a concept difficult to grasp and, once grasped, impossible to accept.'

The plots of Them, in fact, became so incomprehensibly multifarious that it seemed the only way to avoid them was never to leave your room or, ideally, your bed. But that might be playing right into Their hands.

...we're all people. We're all together in this thing, so we could feel very close to each other about it and say all right, we're al lkind of weak and bad but we're going to the best we can and try to muddle through everything together because there's nowhere to go and there's nothing else to be. That way everyone could be fairly happy because no one would hate anybody. But man, talk about incredibly unrealistic utopian impossibilities!