Quotes By Jello Biafra

The jury had down right contempt for punk rock grass roots ethics.

Respecting other people's cultures is well and good, but I draw the line at where some branches of Islam, what they do to women. It's indefensible.

I went through a big Alice Cooper phase, which was probably a major influence on my writing style later, especially after Plastic Surgery Disasters.

It depends on the situation. I mean, on one hand there's the argument that people should be left alone on the other hand, there's the argument to wade in a stop slaughters in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and what we probably should have done in Rwanda.

What they're not doing is marketing the Dead Kennedys in the spirit of what the band stood for.

This is my home. Home is where the disease is. As long as I stay in America, I'll never run out of subjects for songs.

Hardly anybody in America pays attention to local elections.

They've gone to great length to disguise the fact that I'm not in the band, even sending out a photo to promoters with my picture in it which then winds up in some of the ads on the flyers.

For every prohibition you create, you also create an underground.

All of these reissues were not authorized by me, I do not endorse them, the live album was put out without my permission, and I've not seen a dime at this point, either.

Especially in local elections, because hardly anybody pays attention to those - but it's really important who's mayor and who's on the city council, county commissioners, sheriffs, district attorney, and of course the school board.

If you love god, burn a church.

I'm totally down with insurrection in the street. I've had a great time with that over the years. Insurrection in the voting booth is the other part of the equation.

I got involved because I wanted to help inspire more people to get off their butts and register and vote - not just in this election, but in every other election from now on, you know?

Punk was originally about creating new, important, energetic music that would hopefully threaten the status quo and the stupidity of the 1970s.

Well, I don't think I'll ever stop being frustrated or feel fulfilled artistically.

The Sonics I found later and that was pretty important.

You can spend the money on new housing for poor people and the homeless, or you can spend it on a football stadium or a golf course.

When there's people on the other side of the room trying to wipe out your life and things are stacked against you, you can get nervous.

So basically the understanding on these so-called reissues is that they were done behind my back, without my permission, and the band informed me that I would no longer be paid on them at all.

If I get even five per cent of my ideas out and documented before I die, I'll be lucky. I'm not in danger of running out of riffs or ideas anytime soon. They overwhelm me and it's hard to find time to deal with them.

Don't hate the media, become the media.

I don't think it's too hippie to want to clean up the planet so you don't wind up dying of some kind of cancer when you're 45 years old. It enrages me that these big cancer-research organizations can't be bothered to man the front lines of environmental protest.

We didn't have money to put out everything we wanted to put out.

You have to be down here in the States to realize just how tightly controlled the corporate media is and how much they practise Soviet-style censorship through creative omission.

I think that what's perceived as punk out in shopping malls or in chain stores or on MTV has almost nothing to do with what punk is about.

Punk is not dead. Punk will only die when corporations can exploit and mass produce it.

That's the way both they and I travel sometimes. Pick road at random, and when it's time to pull over, you pull over and hope you can find a place to crash.

I didn't really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco.

Let me start by saying, I'm utterly disgusted with the former members of the Dead Kennedys.