Quotes by Russell Brand

Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

Have you been out in society recently? Cause its SHIT.

We’re naked under our clothes; we both know what it’s like to need to fart and hold it in, or not be able to get a hard-on, or worry that a bloke across the room might be looking at your bird and you might have to fight him but he looks well hard.

People dont realize that the future is just now, but later.

People do this a lot. They dont seem to realise that the future is just like now, but in a little while, so they say theyre going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materialises. But everythings not going to be made of leather, the world wont stink of sherbet. Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where youll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to animals - youll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto.The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing.In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out.A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.”Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag.This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done.After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber?What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here.It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness.“What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?”They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. I thought Id be overjoyed, but really its just … another one bites the dust … This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatchers ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in ones enemies.

Companies motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values.

We thought it was nice of you to let him have a go, because, in England, he wouldnt be trusted with a pair of scissors.

By puberty I learned that nothing worth having could be easily attained and to succeed one must be single minded.

I recognize that I have the ability to be selfish, but I also recognize that you cant be happy if you only care about yourself at the expense of other people.

When it comes to your career, you must always try and allow the positive aspects of your character to dictate what happens to you. Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.

Oh, and 13.1 million American people had their homes foreclosed. Because their debt, it turns out, was real; it was only the debt within the financial sector that was imaginary. It was only the people who generated the crisis who got three magical wishes from an economic genie. There was no abracadabra for ordinary people; they just got abraca-fucked.

Every moment is a fresh new beginning, a wonderful inauguration of the great cosmic journey through the universe. We can do whatever we want. We can change reality at any moment.

In the end the British will walk out because 100,000 British cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.” A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannized, or anesthetized into compliance. Gandhi dealt with the colonization of nations by nations; we deal now with the colonization of consciousness by corporations.

Rituals are missing nowadays

Boggle with sex addicts is up there with go-kart racing with junkies.

Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - I shall have heroin, but I shant have a hamburger. What a sexy little paradox.

The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.

The need to find out what will happen if I dont relent or moderate my actions has been a constant source of difficulty and discomfort in my life.