love is a subversive language

If You Were A Dream
Photographs by Thomas Good

Click on the individual image to see a larger version.
Photographs may be reprinted with FULL attribution (Photo: Thomas Good / Love And Struggle).


In memory of Franklin Rosemont (2 October 1943 – 12 April 2009)



“Reiche stürzen. Die Bandenführer
Schreiten daher wie Staatsmänner. Die Völker
Sieht man nicht mehr unter den Rüstungen.”

– Bert Brecht



“Love is a subversive language.”

– Thomas Good



“I look upon this field of crosses…how I wish I could change my vote”

– Tom Verlaine



“Which is the greater crime – to rob a bank or to own one?”

– Bertolt Brecht



“The world is just a feeling you undertook.”

– Tom Verlaine



“Wire is the Soul of electricity”

– Kurt Schwitters



“A clock moves faster with its hands untied.”

– Thomas Good



“Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing who I ‘haunt.’”

– Andre Breton



“I remember how to forget”

– Adrian Belew



“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”

– Eugene Ionesco



“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”

– Rene Magritte



“I wish I was the future – I’d kiss you in the past”

– Robyn Hitchcock



“Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.”

– R. D. Laing



“To impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea.”

– Herbert Marcuse



“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.”

– Andy Warhol



“The absurd has no terrors for me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me.”

– Tristan Tzara



“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”

– Novalis



“The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.”

– Isadora Duncan



“As a thinking person I”m completely in despair, but as a creature I”m quite happy.”

– Robyn Hitchcock



“Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

– Friedrich Nietzsche



“The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.”

– Isadora Duncan



“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”

– Plato



“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.”

– Edgar Allan Poe



“Hilarity is not allowed”

– Frida Berrigan



“Very much alone in my work, I am almost jealous of it.”

– Yves Tanguy



“This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.”

– Kurt Schwitters



“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.”

– Charles Bukowski



“I do tend to take lines from other lines I like, and then write around them.”

– Syd Barrett



“Breton loves as a heart beats. He was in love with love in a world that believes in prostitution.”

– Marcel Duchamp



“I’m full of dust and guitars.”

– Syd Barrett



“The Verrazano Bridge was named after the man who discovered it.”

– Nathaniel Good



“He who strays from tradition becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary…”

– Friedrich Nietzsche



“She said Dream dreams the dreamer. I said it”s not my fault”

– Tom Verlaine



“We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.”

– Saul Alinsky



“Have you seen the roses? There’s a whole lot of colours.”

– Syd Barrett



“Hold on to nothing and he won’t let you down.”

– David Bowie



“If you were a Wonder, if you were a Dream…”

– Thomas Good



“I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.”

– Marcel Duchamp



“Man … is above all the plaything of his memory.”

– Andre Breton



“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”

– Edward R. Murrow



“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it”

– Abbie Hoffman



“Every day feels like another new drug.”

– Bill Nelson



“I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.”

– Marcel Duchamp



“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them.”

– Edward R. Murrow



“The universe is based on solid entropy.”

– Robyn Hitchcock



“Just as Idi Amin Dada was no dadaist — machine Democrats despise democracy.”

– Thomas Good



“…we made airplanes when we might have grown wings…”

– John Brunner



“Memory is a motherfucker.”

– Bill Ayers



“The leaf and his body were one. Neither possessed a separate permanent self. Neither could exist independently from the rest of the universe.” – Thich Nhat Hanh



“Be certain enough to act and to doubt simultaneously”

– Bernardine Dohrn



“Satan is lurking in every invoice.”

– Judith Malina



“At the heart of this imperialism is our silence – who would we be if we did not fight back?”

– Chloe Watlington



“Life in the air age, it’s grim enough to make a robot cry”

– Bill Nelson



“I wish we had left you a better world … we tried…”

– Bernardine Dohrn



“Symmetry is what we see at a glance”

– Blaise Pascal



“For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.”

– Joan Miro



“We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.”

– R. D. Laing



“You can live in your dreams, but only if you are worthy of them.”

– Harlan Ellison



“Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.”

– R. D. Laing



“Knock on the sky and listen to the sound.” – Zen proverb



“What is generally termed reality is, to be precise, a frothy nothing.”

– Hugo Ball



“Children do not believe in God.”

– Wilhelm Reich



“Neither god nor soul can save society.”

– Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar



“Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.”

– Tristan Tzara



“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.”

– Jackson Pollock



“I’m disappearing, avoiding most things.”

– Syd Barrett



“I’m treading the backward path. Mostly, I just waste my time.”

– Syd Barrett



“Only useless things are indispensable.”

– Francis Picabia



“I don’t think I’m easy to talk about. I’ve got a very irregular head. And I’m not anything that you think I am anyway.”

– Syd Barrett



“If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.”

– C. Wright Mills



“Thought is made in the mouth.”

– Tristan Tzara



“If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.”

– John Brunner



“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night!”

– John Lydon



“I like to think oysters transcend national barriers, Adrian.”

– Roger Waters



“Good taste is as tiring as good company.”

– Francis Picabia
(Photo of Thomas Good: Nathaniel Good)



“Things are not what they appear to be: nor are they otherwise.”

– Surangama Sutra



“The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory.”

– Jello Biafra



“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh



“Because metaphors can be lethal”

– Judith Malina



“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”

– Albert Camus



“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

– Carl Jung



“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”

– Jean Cocteau



“Hope raises no dust.”

– Paul Eluard



“I am not a politician… I only suffer the consequences.”

– Peter Tosh



“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.”

– Hermann Hesse



“Who rides, so late, through night and wind? It is the father with his child.”

– Goethe



“That’s what makes a character interesting from an actor’s perspective – the more screwed up, the better.”

– Jeri Ryan



“The Green Scare: As the planet heats up … the state cracks down”

– Eberhardt Press



“The anguish of the American confronted with Americanism is an ambivalent anguish; as if he were asking, “Am I American enough?” and at the same time, “How can I escape from Americanism?”

– Jean-Paul Sartre



“The second period of barbarism may well be the continued empire of civilization itself.”

– Herbert Marcuse



“Dein Name tropft wie weiches Rindertalg. Weisst du es?”

– Kurt Schwitters



“History is a relay of revolutions.”

– Saul Alinsky



“Why shouldn’t pleasure be the substance of life? Let the masses vote on THIS question.”

– Wilhelm Reich



“Like a truth with no believer, like a mother without a child … without love my chance is slim.”

– Bill Nelson



“I’ve got nothing left to lose at this point. The work I’ve done is out there.”

– Jessica Lange

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.