Activist Quotes

As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves.

There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less.

With my somewhat vague aspiring mind, to be imprisoned in the rude details of a most material life was often irksome.

Where there had been only jeers or taunts at first, crowds come to listen with serious and sympathetic men.

When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!

Whatever the practical value of the Walden experiment may be, there is no question that the book is one of the most vital and pithy ever written.

We lived within two hundred yards of the sea, and its voice was in our ears night and day.

The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau's Walden.

The general fact of surplus value, namely that the workmen does not get the full value of his labours, and that he is taken advantage of by the capitalist, is obvious.

My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline.

It is curious that, with my somewhat antinomian tendencies, I should have gone to Trinity Hall - which was, and is, before all a Law College - and should thus have been thrown into close touch with the legal element in life.

IN April 1882 my father died; and I was at once whirled out of my land of dreams into a very different sphere.

I was in the Square at the time. The crowd was a most good-humoured, easy going, smiling crowd; but presently it was transformed. A regiment of mounted police came cantering up.

I should like these few words to be read over the grave when my body is placed in the earth; for though it is possible I may be present and conscious of what is going on, I shall not be able to communicate.

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.

Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.

Early in 1888 one or two of us got together to establish our own Sheffield Socialist Society.

Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped - to reach it.

For so, surely you will cast a light of gladness upon his onward journey, and contribute your part towards the building of that kingdom of love which links our earth to heaven.

Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of the children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent.

No man can given anybody his freedom.

It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.