Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it.

I was a gang leader. Although, it was a gang for defensive purposes. It was not a gang to sell drugs.

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.

A performance art piece is unprecedented. It is difficult to censor since it has a good possibility of never being done before.

We're all so mauled by information, but it's recycled information. We need to shut it out. So, you've got to get bizarre. This is an artist's purpose - to break away from the recycled. Performance art can do that.

Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it.

It is better to go down in infamy than to never go down at all.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.

This is why my art is about violence. Because I was subjected to so much of it as a kid. After that, and a lot of thinking, I became less violent. I realized that there must be other ways. So, I started to pursue them.

At one point, when I was 20 and living in Kentucky, I got shot - it was a land dispute over six inches of property that ran a hundred yards through my grandfather's land. It was really over the honor of my family and that of another family.

The act is truth. Nothing that was ever recorded is truth. Nothing that was ever said is truth. Only the act.

I'm still very aware of the violence in our culture, more so than other people. I know where it comes from when someone is trying to suppress someone else, sometimes they fight back.

Maybe it will be a great thing when the Baby Boomers finally die out. In real life, it's not a matter of the good guys or the bad guys. Rather, it's big numbers and small numbers that do the counting.

My 80-year-old mother will not buy her heart medicine because it cost more than she can pay with social security. She is America.

My parents were laborers so we lived on South Park, which was a low-income region of Seattle. You had a choice - you either joined or formed a gang or you let others bully you.

Performance art can be produced in a coffee house setting.

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.

My kids are free to do what ever they want. Because I only advise. I don't make them do anything.

But my patriotism goes for something beyond what we have. We don't have something that I want to die for - anymore.

Performance art is the ultimate in creativity. Since it has so many possibilities at creativity, it's essence tends to become creativity.

Freedom. It's not something you go out and die for.

I've been in elementary education for years and my belief is that Christmas pageants in schools are little more than conditioning kids for the Christian religion.

I believe that I understand gangs better than others. Because they're formed out of necessity. They're formed by people to keep from being suppressed.

Retirement to me does not mean nothing to do but the realization of the decisions I made in the past. That I made in my life.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

We need to have a culture that says 'the less energy you can use to be comfortable, the better off you are and the better you should feel about yourself'.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

Sex and drugs were simply not discussed in our culture at that time.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

Mr. Speaker, genocide is the most potent of all crimes against humanity because it is an effort to systematically wipe out a people and a culture as well as individual lives.

When I go to Japan and do shows I play for 1,000 to 1,500 people. I like a lot about Japan. Their popular culture and mass commercialization appeals to me.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

There's one more thing I want to say. It's a touchy subject. Black beauty. Black sensuality. We live in a culture where the beauty of black people isn't always as celebrated as other types. I'd like to help change that if I can!

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.