Joe Hill Quotes

Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken, by exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave? Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave?

The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.

I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.

I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning - organize.

I guess Satan was the first superhero [...] In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality.

A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.

If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here—that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love.

The soul may not be destroyed. The soul goes on forever. Like the number pi, it is without cessation or conclusion. Like pi it is a constant. Pi is an irrational number, incapable of being made into a fraction, impossible to divide from itself. So, too, the soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you.

Don't believe everything you hear today

Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.

Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.

But God fears women even more that He fears the devil- and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man.

Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.

Longhaired preachers come out every night, Tryin' to tell us what's wrong and what's right. But when asked about something to eat, They will tell you in voices so sweet. You will eat (You will eat!) By and by, (By and by!) In that glorious land in the sky. (Way up high!) Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die. (That's a lie!)

Don't mourn, Organise

Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?

... people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

Music [is] the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours. To feel something. To burn with all the emotions you didn't get to experience in the ordinary run of school, TV, and loading the dishwasher after dinner.

I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.

I have nothing to say for myself, only that I have always tried to make this earth a little bit better

You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.