The Man Is Sticking It to the Man/Quotes

""How rebellious!... in a conformist sort of way.""

- Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons

""Who's gonna con you into buying a television set and the revolution they sell?""

- Monster Magnet, "Powertrip"

""Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright "revolution" against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming... our televisual marketplace is a 24-hour carnival, a showplace of transgression and inversion of values, of humiliated patriarchs and shocked puritans, of screaming guitars and concupiscent youth, of fashions that are uniformly defiant, of cars that violate convention and shoes that let us be us.""

- Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool

"Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me, You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for your selves! You're all individuals! The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals! Brian: You're all different! The Crowd: Yes, we are all different! Man in crowd: I'm not... The Crowd: Shh!"

- Monty Python's Life of Brian

"You know no two people are like each other So don't be a lookalike copying another Unless of course you're copying me 'Cause that gives you individuality!"

- Phineas and Ferb, "You're Fabulous"

""When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.""

- Eric Hoffer

"Step right up folks Anarchy for sale! T-shirts only 10 dollars Badges only 3.50 I nicked the design, never asked the band I never listen to them either"

- The Dead Kennedys, "Anarchy for Sale"

""Shopping at chain stores is not punk. No matter how much you'd like to think so. Buying shit from Hot Topic, K-Mart and other huge chains selling 'punk' products is about the farthest thing from sticking it to the man as you can get. In fact, you're giving "the man" your money, retard.""

- We Are the Mainstream, "Punk: Attitude for Sale"

"Morkovin: But just what exactly is alternative music - and what is pop? How would you define it? Tatarsky: I don't know. "From the feel, I suppose. Morkovin: There is a precise definition. Morkovin: Alternative music is music the commercial essence of which consists in its extreme anti-commercial ethos. Morkovin: Its anti-pop quality, so to speak. Which means that, in order to get this quality right, an alternative musician must first of all be a really shrewd merchant, and those are rare in the music business. Morkovin: There are plenty of them, of course, but they're not performers, they're managers..."

- Victor Pelevin, Babylon

"Our survey told us what you wanted Rebellion at a low, low price Be an individual through our product Why jeopardize your life?"

- Cop Shoot Cop, Discount Rebellion

""I don't understand the appeal of woke capitalism. I don't understand why anyone cheers when corporations take these political stances. I don't know what they think is happening. To me, it's very clear that they are going to make money off it. It doesn't mean anything else. It's sort of like what happens when all these corporations get involved in LGBT activism for a month. I feel the same way about it. If they think they can profit off it, they will do it. I don't see them as moral creatures so I'm not that mad about it, but I do think it reflects something in the broader culture. By the time a corporation has gotten to the point where they think they can put a hijabi model on the cover of a magazine, they have calculated that something in the broader culture has changed enough that they can profit off it, which means there is a broad sympathy for that view. From that perspective, it's kind of upsetting to see that there is this broader acceptance of practices like hijab.""

- Sarah Haider, co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America, in a June 2019 interview with The Stranger