Jello Quotes

Put tattoos all up and down our thighs, do anything our parents would despise. Take uppers, downers, blues, and reds and yellows, our brains are turning into jello. ~ Joan Baez

Method acting has had a major influence both in writing through the eyes of other people, and seeing through the eyes of other people, trying to address different ideas in a way that would go beyond preaching to the choir. ~ Jello Biafra

If you love god, burn a church. ~ Jello Biafra

I saw the Ramones, early on at a country-rock palace in Denver. They were opening for some record-company band, so the local music establishment, and I emphasize the word "establishment," was there in force, and the handful of us who knew the Ramones were up in front. And half the fun was, you know, not only were the Ramones the most powerful band I had ever seen at that point, but they made it look so simple - that anyone could do it, hell, even I could do it. This is what I should be doing. ~ Jello Biafra

To this day, we get letters at Alternative Tentacles from young teenagers who hide their Dead Kennedys albums behind their mirror or in the mattress of their bed. Wouldn't it be better if the parents just discussed this with the kids instead of creating this culture of sneaking and dishonesty within the family? The moral of the story being, you don't hide reality from your kids because then they grow up to be smarter, more aware adults. ~ Jello Biafra

Patriotism does not mean giving blind loyalty and a blank check to George W. Bush. ~ Jello Biafra

The Grateful Dead did not play in sets; no eight numbers to a set, then a twenty-five-minute break, and so on, four or five sets and then the close-out. The Dead might play one number for five minutes or thirty minutes. Who kept time? Who could keep time, with history cut up in slices. The Dead could get just as stoned as anyone else. The ... non-attuned would look about and here would be all manner of heads, including those running the show, the Pranksters, stroked out against the walls like slices of Jello. Waiting; with nobody looking very likely to start it back up. Those who didn't care to wait would tend to drift off, stoned or otherwise, and the Test would settle down to the pudding. ~ Tom Wolfe

And we will NOT let Campbell's Soup, Old Navy, or anybody ELSE, HAMMER into the minds of girls as YOUNG as SIX YEARS OLD that they should ALWAYS hate their bodies and ALWAYS be on a diet! ~ Jello Biafra

No matter what I do, my songs come out in a certain style, and if that sounds like Dead Kennedys, then there's probably a reason for it. Don't forget, I wrote most of those songs, music and lyrics. ~ Jello Biafra

A hairstyle's not a lifestyle. ~ Jello Biafra

If I get even five per cent of my ideas out and documented before I die, I'll be lucky. I'm not in danger of running out of riffs or ideas anytime soon. They overwhelm me and it's hard to find time to deal with them. ~ Jello Biafra

Punk rock will never die, until something more dangerous replaces it. ~ Jello Biafra

It was a delicious meal
skim milk, wheat middlings, leftover pancakes, half a doughnut, the rind of a summer squash, two pieces of stale toast, a third of a gingersnap, a fish tail, one orange peel, several noodles from a noodle soup, the scum off a cup of cocoa, an ancient jelly roll, a strip of paper from the lining of the garbage pail, and a spoonful of raspberry jello. ~ E.B. White

The Sonics I found later and that was pretty important. ~ Jello Biafra

For every prohibition you create, you also create an underground. ~ Jello Biafra

Producing is like pushing jello up a hill on a hot day. ~ Lucy Liu

We don't need a flat tax, but a flattening tax, to truly level the playing field. ~ Jello Biafra

I enjoy getting people angry and getting underneath their skin, especially people who don't think. ~ Jello Biafra

This is a love story," Michael Dean says, "but really what isn't? Doesn't the detective love the mystery or the chase, or the nosey female reporter who is even now being held against her wishes at an empty warehouse on the waterfront? Surely, the serial murder loves his victims, and the spy loves his gadgets, or his country or the exotic counterspy. The ice-trucker is torn between his love for ice and truck and the competing chefs go crazy for scallops, and the pawnshop guys adore their junk. Just as the housewives live for catching glimpses of their own botoxed brows in gilded hall mirrors and the rocked out dude on 'roids totally wants to shred the ass of the tramp-tatted girl on hookbook. Because this is reality, they are all in love, madly, truly, with the body-mic clipped to their back-buckle and the producer casually suggesting, "Just one more angle.", "One more jello shot.".

And the robot loves his master. Alien loves his saucer. Superman loves Lois. Lex and Lana. Luke loves Leia, til he finds out she's his sister. And the exorcist loves the demon, even as he leaps out the window with it, in full soulful embrace. As Leo loves Kate, and they both love the sinking ship. And the shark, god the shark, loves to eat. Which is what the Mafioso loves too, eating and money and Pauly and Omertà. The way the cowboy loves his horse, loves the corseted girl behind the piano bar and sometimes loves the other cowboy. As the vampire loves night and neck. And the zombie, do ~ Jess Walter

I'm totally down with insurrection in the street. I've had a great time with that over the years. Insurrection in the voting booth is the other part of the equation. ~ Jello Biafra

In the case of Michael Moore, having a deep, I'd even say passionate, understanding of other types of people in America who might be progressive thinkers without even realizing it. ~ Jello Biafra

Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter for a jello mold. ~ Diane Glancy

Bicky rocked, like a jelly in a high wind. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

We didn't have money to put out everything we wanted to put out. ~ Jello Biafra

I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies. ~ Jello Biafra

I have very mixed feelings about Jesse Jackson. He's very good about labor, and human and civil rights issues, but not so good on cultural issues. ~ Jello Biafra

Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star. ~ Toni Morrison

When "Search and Destroy" by the Stooges came on as a Nike shoe commercial, I got physically sick. That song meant the world to me, and I didn't feel this was the way it ought to be used. ~ Jello Biafra

I'm tired of being ruled by the Skull and Bones. The only place they belong are on punk-rock albums! ~ Jello Biafra

Then, there was Cary Grant. He spent three hours a week in hospitals teaching nervous people how to eat jello. ~ Red Buttons

If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve. ~ Jello Biafra

Trying to hit Phil Niekro is like trying to eat jello with chopsticks. Sometimes you get a piece but most of the time you get hungry. ~ Bobby Murcer

My attitude is if somebody blunders into the level of popularity; at least remember the human factor. These guys are still human beings and hopefully still have hearts and if you keep in touch with them rather than vilify them you may be able to encourage them to go in the right direction. What I'm hoping will eventually happen is that they will grasp the amount of power and financial clout that is now at their fingertips and use those as tools to help real people with real things the way punk politics was always designed to do before, but nobody had any money. ~ Jello Biafra

I don't know whether I see it as slipping inside the villains, but part of what makes Ralph Nader and Michael Moore such effective speakers and communicators is that they know how corporate culture works, how our lawmaking bodies really work, and where the bones are buried. ~ Jello Biafra

That's the way both they and I travel sometimes. Pick road at random, and when it's time to pull over, you pull over and hope you can find a place to crash. ~ Jello Biafra

What does it say about our country when people are so desperate for an alternative to our one-party state masquerading as a two-party state that they'll even elect a professional wrestler governor? ~ Jello Biafra

I do fear for the generations of people who came of age thinking that pop-punk is what punk is, and that all the rebellion you need is just to stick your tongue out in the mirror every once in a while. ~ Jello Biafra

I don't think it's too hippie to want to clean up the planet so you don't wind up dying of some kind of cancer when you're 45 years old. It enrages me that these big cancer-research organizations can't be bothered to man the front lines of environmental protest. ~ Jello Biafra

I got turned on to rock music almost by mistake when I was seven years old. ~ Jello Biafra

You are a major dimwit. Is your brain made out of jello, you spineless twit? A leaf? What do you think I am, one of those magical raccoons? I'm a concept, get it? Con-cept! Concepts and raccoons aren't exactly the same, now are they? What a dumb thing to say ... ~ Haruki Murakami

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books. ~ Neal Stephenson

We need a new law that owners of SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles) are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil. ~ Jello Biafra

The last true punk band to get a major label contract was The Dickies. ~ Jello Biafra

That's how it always is in the entertainment industry, your feet are always treading Jello. ~ Hedy Lamarr

Heavy Metal is the most conservative of all loud music. Let's face it, not even a gym teacher could get as many people to dress alike. ~ Jello Biafra

Shut up, be happy. Obey all orders without question. The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory. ~ Jello Biafra

We've never had a situation where mass media has been so censored, at least in my lifetime. When I was younger, networks like NBC, CBS, were independently owned, and took their jobs as journalists seriously. There used to be documentaries like "The Selling of the Pentagon." ~ Jello Biafra

Anger is like a piece of shredded wheat stuck in your dentures. If you leave it there, you'll get a blister and have to eat jello for a week. ~ Sophia

Any alternative culture that inspires a lot of passion and inspiration is also in danger of being set in its ways, almost from the moment it's born. ~ Jello Biafra

Balance the budget ? Tax religion. ~ Jello Biafra

Well, I don't think I'll ever stop being frustrated or feel fulfilled artistically. ~ Jello Biafra

The jury had down right contempt for punk rock grass roots ethics. ~ Jello Biafra

My parents didn't hide reality. I watched cartoons and the news with equal fascination. ~ Jello Biafra

So basically the understanding on these so-called reissues is that they were done behind my back, without my permission, and the band informed me that I would no longer be paid on them at all. ~ Jello Biafra

It's as if we spend our entire lives avoiding Jell-O but it is always there at the end, waiting. ~ John Grisham

I didn't really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco. ~ Jello Biafra

It's very irresponsible as a parent to follow Tipper Gore or the Religious Right's advice and just take the offending CD or game away from the kid without discussing it. ~ Jello Biafra

In San Francisco, most of the older activists, especially at Berkeley, were very hostile towards punks. The music, certainly, wasn't nice and mellow for them, and neither was our look or our attitude. While in Vancouver, the two most important early punk bands, D.O.A. and the Subhumans, were both managed by former yippie activists, who saw this as a logical extension of what they were already doing. ~ Jello Biafra

Big Brother has no interest in well-informed citizens capable of critical thinking. Big Brother wants you to shop at Wal-Mart, where He will control the media that influences your life. The media works with the government and with the large corporations to form mass culture, which is utilized to create public consent, and most folks aren't even aware of this process as it goes on all around them. Big Brother is actively seeking the complacency of the wage-slaves. Big Brother doesn't want you to know about the spoken word performances given by Henry Rollins, or Jello Biafra or Terrence McKenna- or a thousand other people- because they will crack your laminate of societal posturing. Big Brother doesn't want you to know about Bill Hicks, because Brother Bill will provide you with the courage and impetus to spit in Big Brother's face. The internet is but one facet of our mass-marketed popular culture, and everyone is plugged into it. If you're reading this, you are a part of it, the internet, one large hive mind, a singular consciousness. And that can be a good thing, but too often, people let themselves slip into it, into this world, to the point where they are no longer able to differentiate between what they think, what they know, and what is thrust upon them. They have no access to their own point of view, or their own spiritual consciousness, for lack of a better way to phrase it. So, to answer your question, in a lengthy and circuitous fashion, I would say that disgust with ~ Larry Mitchell

It depends on the situation. I mean, on one hand there's the argument that people should be left alone on the other hand, there's the argument to wade in a stop slaughters in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and what we probably should have done in Rwanda. ~ Jello Biafra

From the beginning, there was so much pressure in the early San Francisco punk scene for everyone to be different than everyone else, to flaunt your intelligence and insights instead of every band sounding alike, like what plagues punk music in particular today. ~ Jello Biafra

I am an anarchist in my personal life. I try to live my life in a way that I don't need cops or baby-sitters to keep me from infringing on others. But I don't feel we have evolved far enough as a species to make anarchy work in society itself. We still need government to transfer the wealth from those who have too much to those who have too little, to make sure important projects get done, and keep territorial humans from screwing over and killing each other. ~ Jello Biafra

The bus is full of German tourists in shorts so short that they required a Brazilian wax for the men as well as the women. There had been thighs as bountiful as baking bread, as wobbly as Jello, and as pitted as the surface of the moon. ~ Rob Thurman

Especially in local elections, because hardly anybody pays attention to those - but it's really important who's mayor and who's on the city council, county commissioners, sheriffs, district attorney, and of course the school board. ~ Jello Biafra

What I'm getting at is, you know, if we really want to get serious about helping all the people living in the street and getting people jobs, we could just hire half the people in the country to spy on the other half. ~ Jello Biafra

News footage came on the TV during dinner of bloody bodies coming back from battle in Vietnam, or the race riots in the South, people getting hosed in Selma, Alabama, or the Biafra war, where I got my name. In my household, it was explained and discussed with the children, as a way of educating us from when we first started grade school why racism and war were wrong, what this all really means. ~ Jello Biafra

Once you get involved with bloodsport litigation, you can not only get drunk on your own greed but start to believe your own lies. ~ Jello Biafra

You have to be down here in the States to realize just how tightly controlled the corporate media is and how much they practise Soviet-style censorship through creative omission. ~ Jello Biafra

I never expected the movement against globalization and corporate rule to mushroom as quickly as it has, either. And right now the strongest electoral arm of that movement is the Green Party. I try to stress to people cynical about voting that the Greens are the most effective electoral arm of the so-called Spirit of Seattle, and it's great fun to cause trouble in the streets, but that's not going to accomplish much without insurrection in the voting booth at the same time. ~ Jello Biafra

I think that what's perceived as punk out in shopping malls or in chain stores or on MTV has almost nothing to do with what punk is about. ~ Jello Biafra

When my sixth grade teacher opened the class with subtle praise for the guardsmen shooting four people to death at Kent State, I'd given up arguing with her by that point. But I was very riled up inside and vowed that I would never forget that. ~ Jello Biafra

Punk is not dead. Punk will only die when corporations can exploit and mass produce it. ~ Jello Biafra

The boyfriend of the student music teacher came in: "Hey, kids, this is a real Air Force pilot." I asked him something to the effect of how it felt to be dropping bombs on children in Vietnamese villages. And it got very icy in there all of a sudden, and finally the teacher said, "Oh, well, Eric reads a lot of newspapers. Next question." ~ Jello Biafra

Then as I got older, I always gravitated towards the hard stuff, Born To Be Wild, then Black Sabbath. ~ Jello Biafra

You've got to have an ego as big as Mars to want to think that you, of all people, are better than anyone else to be president of the United States. People that vain, they want their place in history, and they want to be able to control how much they'll be worshipped by future generations. ~ Jello Biafra

They've gone to great length to disguise the fact that I'm not in the band, even sending out a photo to promoters with my picture in it which then winds up in some of the ads on the flyers. ~ Jello Biafra

I got out of that immediately was that now, all of a sudden, rock music had become a spectator sport, that corporate labels and their bands were the new establishment, and punk was there to fight them the way the activist hippies must have fought what the establishment must have been ten years before. And it was interesting to see the reactions in different parts of the country. ~ Jello Biafra

Hardly anybody in America pays attention to local elections. ~ Jello Biafra

Even the most Bush-happy, flag suckling jack-arse knows deep-down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odor and changing the channel ain't going to make this go away. ~ Jello Biafra

What they're not doing is marketing the Dead Kennedys in the spirit of what the band stood for. ~ Jello Biafra

Let me start by saying, I'm utterly disgusted with the former members of the Dead Kennedys. ~ Jello Biafra

You can spend the money on new housing for poor people and the homeless, or you can spend it on a football stadium or a golf course. ~ Jello Biafra

I would hate to have "Holiday in Cambodia" become as tiresome to other people as hearing "Like a Rock" in a Chevrolet commercial. ~ Jello Biafra

I think Noam Chomsky is a national treasure - make that an international treasure. ~ Jello Biafra

It's no fun picking on you Louis; you're so guilty, it's like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there's no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish. ~ Tony Kushner

This is my home. Home is where the disease is. As long as I stay in America, I'll never run out of subjects for songs. ~ Jello Biafra