Top 82 Jello Biafra Quotes
#1. Punk rock will never die, until something more dangerous replaces it.
Jello Biafra
#2. Our biggest national security threat is the environmental destruction of our planet and the arms race with ourselves.
Jello Biafra
#3. I went through a big Alice Cooper phase, which was probably a major influence on my writing style later, especially after Plastic Surgery Disasters.
Jello Biafra
#4. Looking back, I didn't realize until years later what a huge influence Red Skelton was in my stage demeanor with the band. I mean, I always liked things that were funny, and later I realized that having a sly sense of humor was a way to get attention and even respect in school.
Jello Biafra
#5. Let me start by saying, I'm utterly disgusted with the former members of the Dead Kennedys.
Jello Biafra
#6. Punk is not dead. Punk will only die when corporations can exploit and mass produce it.
Jello Biafra
#7. We've never had a situation where mass media has been so censored, at least in my lifetime. When I was younger, networks like NBC, CBS, were independently owned, and took their jobs as journalists seriously. There used to be documentaries like "The Selling of the Pentagon."
Jello Biafra
#8. What they're not doing is marketing the Dead Kennedys in the spirit of what the band stood for.
Jello Biafra
#9. I got turned on to rock music almost by mistake when I was seven years old.
Jello Biafra
#10. I enjoy getting people angry and getting underneath their skin, especially people who don't think.
Jello Biafra
#11. When my sixth grade teacher opened the class with subtle praise for the guardsmen shooting four people to death at Kent State, I'd given up arguing with her by that point. But I was very riled up inside and vowed that I would never forget that.
Jello Biafra
#12. 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.
Jello Biafra
#13. And we will NOT let Campbell's Soup, Old Navy, or anybody ELSE, HAMMER into the minds of girls as YOUNG as SIX YEARS OLD that they should ALWAYS hate their bodies and ALWAYS be on a diet!
Jello Biafra
#14. I've been to enough other countries in the world to know what happens when you have socialized single-payer health care. It works. People don't get sick as much. They don't lose their life savings with a catastrophic illness like cancer or AIDS.
Jello Biafra
#15. 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.
Jello Biafra
#16. I'm tired of being ruled by the Skull and Bones. The only place they belong are on punk-rock albums!
Jello Biafra
#17. The underground scene is still a cool way to meet a lot of cool people, see a lot of interesting bands and get a lot of food for thought, but people have to remain curious and get their brain activity food from other places besides punk.
Jello Biafra
#18. 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.
Jello Biafra
#19. My parents didn't hide reality. I watched cartoons and the news with equal fascination.
Jello Biafra
#20. There's sort of an open offer to work with a guy in Los Angeles who does big band and orchestra arrangements who was at least an acquaintance to Les Baxter before he passed away.
Jello Biafra
#21. 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.
Jello Biafra
#22. If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.
Jello Biafra
#23. Any alternative culture that inspires a lot of passion and inspiration is also in danger of being set in its ways, almost from the moment it's born.
Jello Biafra
#24. Well, I don't think I'll ever stop being frustrated or feel fulfilled artistically.
Jello Biafra
#25. Patriotism does not mean giving blind loyalty and a blank check to George W. Bush.
Jello Biafra
#26. 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.
Jello Biafra
#27. I would hate to have "Holiday in Cambodia" become as tiresome to other people as hearing "Like a Rock" in a Chevrolet commercial.
Jello Biafra
#28. 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.
Jello Biafra
#30. I have very mixed feelings about Jesse Jackson. He's very good about labor, and human and civil rights issues, but not so good on cultural issues.
Jello Biafra
#31. All my different kinds of artwork have been designed to inspire people to think. They may not always agree with me, but at least they will have some feelings and some passion about whatever it is.
Jello Biafra
#32. 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.
Jello Biafra
#33. The last true punk band to get a major label contract was The Dickies.
Jello Biafra
#34. 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.
Jello Biafra
#35. 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.
Jello Biafra
#37. 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.
Jello Biafra
#38. 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.
Jello Biafra
#39. We didn't have money to put out everything we wanted to put out.
Jello Biafra
#40. Even the most Bush-happy, flag suckling jack-arse knows deep-down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odor and changing the channel ain't going to make this go away.
Jello Biafra
#41. In many ways, I have no idea what would have become of me if punk hadn't happened, because the '70s turned out to be so stale, and so boring, and so backward compared to what had come just before. We were too young to have fully experienced the '60s and the fervor of the anti-war movement.
Jello Biafra
#42. A lot of the best acting training I had was in junior high and high school. We had very demanding directors and did real plays. You put our plays up against any theater troupe of any age, and they usually did pretty damn well.
Jello Biafra
#43. The jury had down right contempt for punk rock grass roots ethics.
Jello Biafra
#44. Jimi Hendrix once said, 'You will never hear surf music again.' Well, tonight, you will hear 'serf' music again
S-E-R-F music.
Jello Biafra
#45. Punk was originally about creating new, important, energetic music that would hopefully threaten the status quo and the stupidity of the 1970s.
Jello Biafra
#46. What does it say about our country when people are so desperate for an alternative to our one-party state masquerading as a two-party state that they'll even elect a professional wrestler governor?
Jello Biafra
#47. Another part of what gave me a questioning, rabble-rousing, activist heart and soul is that when all these heavy events went down, my parents did not shelter the kids from it.
Jello Biafra
#48. Method acting has had a major influence both in writing through the eyes of other people, and seeing through the eyes of other people, trying to address different ideas in a way that would go beyond preaching to the choir.
Jello Biafra
#49. I don't know whether I see it as slipping inside the villains, but part of what makes Ralph Nader and Michael Moore such effective speakers and communicators is that they know how corporate culture works, how our lawmaking bodies really work, and where the bones are buried.
Jello Biafra
#50. I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies.
Jello Biafra
#51. I'm appalled at how many people my age, or even five or ten years younger, have no tangible memories of important history that happened when we were growing up.
Jello Biafra
#52. I do fear for the generations of people who came of age thinking that pop-punk is what punk is, and that all the rebellion you need is just to stick your tongue out in the mirror every once in a while.
Jello Biafra
#54. Then as I got older, I always gravitated towards the hard stuff, Born To Be Wild, then Black Sabbath.
Jello Biafra
#55. I didn't really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco.
Jello Biafra
#56. From the beginning, there was so much pressure in the early San Francisco punk scene for everyone to be different than everyone else, to flaunt your intelligence and insights instead of every band sounding alike, like what plagues punk music in particular today.
Jello Biafra
#57. No matter what I do, my songs come out in a certain style, and if that sounds like Dead Kennedys, then there's probably a reason for it. Don't forget, I wrote most of those songs, music and lyrics.
Jello Biafra
#58. You've got to have an ego as big as Mars to want to think that you, of all people, are better than anyone else to be president of the United States. People that vain, they want their place in history, and they want to be able to control how much they'll be worshipped by future generations.
Jello Biafra
#59. Heavy Metal is the most conservative of all loud music. Let's face it, not even a gym teacher could get as many people to dress alike.
Jello Biafra
#60. If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.
Jello Biafra
#61. 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.
Jello Biafra
#62. When "Search and Destroy" by the Stooges came on as a Nike shoe commercial, I got physically sick. That song meant the world to me, and I didn't feel this was the way it ought to be used.
Jello Biafra
#63. If I go without rock for too long, I feel depressed.
Jello Biafra
#64. I went to Seattle as just another geek in the food chain, thinking, "Well, in my own puny little way, I'd rather be a part of history than just sit and watch it on TV." So, the fact that so many people are starting to ask the right questions and rack their brains for solutions does give me hope.
Jello Biafra
#65. The Sonics I found later and that was pretty important.
Jello Biafra
#66. 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.
Jello Biafra
#67. Hardly anybody in America pays attention to local elections.
Jello Biafra
#68. We don't need a flat tax, but a flattening tax, to truly level the playing field.
Jello Biafra
#69. What I'm getting at is, you know, if we really want to get serious about helping all the people living in the street and getting people jobs, we could just hire half the people in the country to spy on the other half.
Jello Biafra
#70. If you liked school, you're gonnnnna lovvvvve work!
Jello Biafra
#71. We need a new law that owners of SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles) are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil.
Jello Biafra
#72. It's very irresponsible as a parent to follow Tipper Gore or the Religious Right's advice and just take the offending CD or game away from the kid without discussing it.
Jello Biafra
#73. For every prohibition you create, you also create an underground.
Jello Biafra
#75. 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.
Jello Biafra
#76. I think Noam Chomsky is a national treasure - make that an international treasure.
Jello Biafra
#77. Once you get involved with bloodsport litigation, you can not only get drunk on your own greed but start to believe your own lies.
Jello Biafra
#78. Shut up, be happy. Obey all orders without question. The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory.
Jello Biafra
#79. I've never been a big fan of subtle art. I like art that gets deep into my head and starts my brain spinning with new ideas and inspiration and my whole body is full of energy.
Jello Biafra
#80. 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?
Jello Biafra
#81. In the case of Michael Moore, having a deep, I'd even say passionate, understanding of other types of people in America who might be progressive thinkers without even realizing it.
Jello Biafra
#82. 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.
Jello Biafra
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