You can have all those colors on your shirts. I don’t think there is any law that can prevent it, but you will look simply foolish. Those generals, they don’t look foolish, they are respected; they are great heroes. And what have they done? They have murdered many people of your country, they have murdered many people of other countries. These murderers are rewarded.

Have you seen any society rewarding its lovers? No, lovers are to be condemned. No society allows lovers any respect; love is an anathema to society.

So the first thing all these vested interests have to do is distract you from love – and they have succeeded up to now.

Millions of years…and man has remained a slave, feeling a deep inferiority complex in himself, unworthiness, because he is not able to fulfill all that is required of him. In fact, whatever is required is so unnatural that there is no way to fulfill it. And on your worthlessness the messiahs go on becoming bigger and bigger, because they say, they promise that they are the saviors; they are going to save you. You cannot save yourself. They never allowed you to learn swimming. On your own you can only be drowned.

The politicians go on giving you hope that soon there will be no poverty – and poverty goes on growing. It is not decreasing, it is increasing. The politicians go on saying that soon you will have a classless society. In Soviet Russia they have managed to create forcibly, against all human values, a classless society. But the people who had promised the classless society had promised that there would be no poor, no poverty. What has actually happened is that nobody is rich in Russia, all are equally poor. Great equality!

And the hypocrisy that the society is classless has to be understood. Yes, old class differences have disappeared because the rich are no longer there, so you cannot divide the society into the bourgeois and the proletariat. But a new class has come up: those who have power – the communist bureaucracy – and those who have no power. Just the names have changed.

Now, as a member of the communist party you have special powers – just the same way that in other countries rich people have special powers, and there is the rest of the country, powerless. This is not a classless society; new classes have replaced the old classes.

In Ethiopia thousands of people are dying every day. And you will be surprised, in America there are half a million people who are suffering from overeating, obesity; they go on becoming fatter and fatter. In Ethiopia people are shrinking, starving and dying. In America people are dying from overeating, in Ethiopia they are dying because they have nothing to eat.

Do you think this world that we have created is sane?

Half of India is going to face the same fate as Ethiopia soon – and India’s government is selling wheat, exporting wheat to the outside world. Their own people are going to die – not in small numbers: fifty percent of India is just on the borderline. Any moment it can become a bigger Ethiopia. But the political leaders are selling the wheat to other countries because they want nuclear plants, atomic energy, so they can also compete in the foolish race that is going on.