Joe Hill
Joe Hill
Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, and also known as Joseph Hillströmwas a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World. A native Swedish speaker, he learned English during the early 1900s, while working various jobs from New York to San Francisco. Hill, an immigrant worker frequently facing unemployment and underemployment, became a popular songwriter and cartoonist for the radical union. His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave", "The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth7 October 1879
CountryUnited States of America
I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.
All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.
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.
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.
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.
Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?
I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite - one little drip of mud and grit at a time.
I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning - organize.
Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.
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.
... 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.
It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.
He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places. If he wanted to take a shot at it, he’d have to turn the barrel against his own temple.