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.

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.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

Well, after I had the heart attack, it was a very simple choice. What the doctor told me I did and I did it religiously. I ate nothing but lean turkey breast or chicken breast or a piece of fish that was very lean. I mean I stayed away from everything.

From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.

We believe that the European Union is facing a truly historic choice.

If you're a sports fan you realize that when you meet somebody, like a girlfriend, they kind of have to root for your team. They don't have a choice.

We choose what attitudes we have right now. And it's a continuing choice.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

We in this Congress have a choice. The American people have a right to exercise a choice on this issue, as to whether our men and women will continue to fight and die in a war based on deception and fantasy, or to start bringing the troops home.

The choice is between which mistake is easier to correct: underdoing it or overdoing it.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.

I don't know whether these people are going to find themselves, but as they live their lives they have no choice but to face up to the image others have of them. They're forced to look at themselves in a mirror, and they often manage to glimpse something of themselves.

You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.

Where we have the choice between putting a dollar against those that are going to advance horizontal integration and those that are going to sustain current capability, we'd rather put them against the horizontal integration activity.

Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation.

At only 20 years old I got married. I was still a kid myself, but in those times, if you got someone pregnant, you had no choice but to get married. So I left school and the only thing I could do was sing.

And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you're as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here's a voucher, go sign up.

It was never really my choice to be an action heroine.

This war of choice in Iraq is undermining the very fabric of American society.

Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.

There are plenty of lesbians in Hollywood, but they're not out. And that's their choice, but I can't do that, it's too important to me.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.