without people you're nothing

They used to ask me, “So how do you guys think you’re going to change the world?” -  like some smart-ass newspaper reporter, who wouldn’t know tenderness from a can of beans. “So, you guys have the audacity,” they used to say, “to think you can change the world?” And, man, when they push you down it’s hard not to fall. But that was ten years ago, and I’ve been thinking about that. “So, you schmucks think you can change the world?”, they’d say to us. And they said it so often you began to believe them, which is fatal. Trust thyself. And so now I’d like to say, people can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. Show me any country and there will be people in it and it’s the people who make the country. And people gotta stop pretending they ain’t on the world. People are running about following their little tracks. And I am one of them. But we all gotta stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything. This is something that I am beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. It’s because they’ve been dehumanized. It’s time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed? It ain’t going anywhere. The richest person in the world is the most unhappy one. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. You know, think on that. Without people you’re nothing – that’s my spiel.

- Joe Strummer, British songwriter and musician