Daily Inspiration Quote by Abbie Hoffman

Hoffman flips the moral script with the glee of someone who knows the script was rigged in the first place. The line opens on familiar, almost Sunday-school ethics: stealing from your “brother or sister” is evil. Then he yanks the floor out. If morality means protecting the vulnerable, he suggests, why treat banks, corporations, and state bureaucracies as sacred victims? In Hoffman’s framing, the true sin is obedience to institutions that steal first - through war budgets, predatory finance, exploitative labor, and the everyday siphoning of agency. “Pig Empire” isn’t subtle; it’s a countercultural slur that collapses cops, capital, and government into one blunt adversary.

The intent isn’t to endorse petty crime as lifestyle branding. It’s to moralize expropriation, to recast theft as a form of redistribution or self-defense when the system itself is criminal. The subtext is a dare: if you accept the empire’s property rules as neutral, you’re already collaborating. Hoffman targets liberal guilt and middle-class propriety, pressuring the audience to choose between interpersonal ethics and structural ethics - and then insisting they’re the same thing.

Context matters: late 1960s/early 1970s radicalism, the Yippies’ street theater, Vietnam, COINTELPRO paranoia, and a sense that conventional protest had been absorbed by spectacle. This line is protest-as-provocation: a meme before memes, designed to scandalize, recruit, and force a conversation about who “stealing” really describes in America.