Daily Inspiration Quote by Abbie Hoffman

Revolutionary romance is cheap; surviving the state is expensive. Abbie Hoffman’s line is a jailbreak of a sentence: it drags the word “duty” out of patriotism and snaps it onto the wrist of dissent, then ends on the most unglamorous verb imaginable. “Get away with it” is what you say about shoplifting or pranks, not history-making. That’s the point. Hoffman punctures the martyr myth and replaces it with a street-level ethic of effectiveness. If your revolution ends with a televised perp walk, the spectacle feeds the very system you’re trying to jam.

The intent is tactical, almost managerial: a revolutionary’s first job isn’t purity, or even righteousness, but continuity. Keep the movement alive, keep the people out of jail, keep the infrastructure intact. The subtext is a critique of performative radicalism before the term existed. Hoffman knew that the state’s most reliable tool isn’t just violence; it’s attrition. Arrests drain money, time, morale. Trials become theater, and theater can be swallowed by the cameras, the narrative, the prosecutors. “Get away with it” is also a wink at the Yippie strategy: use humor, misdirection, and media-savvy stunts to make authority look ridiculous while avoiding the consequences that would neutralize you.

In the late 1960s and after Chicago ’68, Hoffman had personal reasons to say this. Government surveillance and prosecution weren’t abstractions; they were the weather. The line carries that hard-earned cynicism: the revolution won’t be judged by how loudly it declares itself, but by how long it can keep operating under pressure.