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Activism Quotes

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Activism Quotes

“Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.”

PoliceActivismAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityBirminghamDemonstrations
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“The significant conclusion emerges that those whites without a vested interest in segregation have found acceptable exactly the changes that the nonviolent demonstrations present as their central demands. Those objectives Negroes have dramatized, fought for and defined have clearly become fair and reasonable demands to the white population, both North and South. The summer of our discontent, far from alienating America' white citizens, brought them closer into harmony with its Negro citizens than ever before.”

AmericaActivismCivil RightsProtestAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationAmericans
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“If anyone had questioned how deeply the summer's activities had penetrated the consciousness of white America, the answer was evident in the treatment accorded the March on Washington by all the media of communication. Normally Negro activities are the object of attention in the press only when they are likely to lead to some dramatic outbreak, or possess some bizarre quality. The March was the first organized Negro operation which was accorded respect and coverage commensurate with its importance. The millions who viewed it on television were seeing an event historic not only because of the subject, but because it was being brought into their homes. Millions of white Americans, for the first time, had a clear, long look at Negroes engaged in a serious occupation. For the first time millions listened to the informed and thoughtful words of Negro spokesmen, from all walks of life. The stereotype of the Negro suffered a heavy blow. This was evident in some of the comment, which reflected surprise at the dignity, the organization and even the wearing apparel and friendly spirit of the participants. If the press had expected something akin to a minstrel show, or a brawl, or a comic display of odd clothes and bad manners, they were disappointed. A great deal has been said about a dialogue between Negro and white. Genuinely to achieve it requires that all the media of communication open their channels wide as they did on that radiant August day. As television beamed the image of this extraordinary gathering across the border oceans, everyone who believed in man's capacity to better himself had a moment of inspiration and confidence in the future of the human race. And every dedicated American could be proud that a dynamic experience of democracy in his nation's capital had been made visible to the world.”

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Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“Recently, Roy Wilkins and I appeared on the television program "Meet the Press." There were the usual questions about how much more the Negro wants, but there seemed to be a new undercurrent of implications related to the sturdy new strength of our movement. Without the courtly complexities, we were, in effect, being asked if we could be trusted to hold back the surging tides of discontent so that those on the shore would not be made too uncomfortable by the buffeting and onrushing waves. Some of the questions implied that our leadership would be judged in accordance with our capacity to "keep the Negro from going too far." The quotes are mine, but I think the phrase mirrors the thinking of the panelists as well as of many other white Americans.”

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Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“Climate change means some bleak prospects for the decades ahead, but I don’t believe the appropriate response to that challenge is withdrawal, is surrender. I think you have to do everything you can to make the world accommodate dignified and flourishing life, rather than giving up early, before the fight has been lost or won, and acclimating yourself to a dreary future brought into being by others less concerned about climate pain. The fight is, definitively, not yet lost—in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.”

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Book:The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
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“You don't have to be a PhD to be an activist," she said as we talked one evening, after I'd shared my worries about not having been able to move forward with my education as quickly as I wanted to. Katrarine didn't discourage me from pursuing my school goals, but she also told me I didn't need to wait for a piece of paper to give me permission to try to make a difference in the world." I don't even know where to start with this one. I guess I'll with the simplest. Anyone can make a difference in the world.”

ActivismStand Up
Book:Toufah: The Woman Who Inspired an African #Metoo Movement
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“It's 1963: we're in the year of prophetic fulfillment. The last revival meeting is at hand, where the sons took up the cross of the fathers. White sons went forth to the dirt roads of Georgia and Alabama to prove to their fathers that the melting pot could still melt. "Negro" sons went forth to the Woolworths and Grants and Greyhounds of America to prove to their fathers that they could eat and sit and ride as well in the front as in the back, as well seated as standing.”

RaceActivismCivil RightsProtestBlacksSegregationRace RelationsCivil Rights MovementWhites1963
Book:Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
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“As I imagine the stink of the oil that the birds and their rescuers endured, I begin to think about the photograph differently. Because to act to save birds and other species from ruination caused by humans is not only a profound sense of engagement with our imagination but illustrates that human agency is also the dynamic of repair. And I know which version of humanity I prefer.”

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Book:Abundance: Nature in Recovery
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“I encourage readers to get informed and expand their perspective on war and global events. My life has been profoundly affected by the Bosnian War and genocide. I have made it my life mission to spread awareness about the excruciating impact it had on the lives of millions of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnians. My goal is to honor Bosnian people who were raped, tortured, and murdered from senseless violence. Bosnians have literally gone through every form of degradation from Serbs. They were beaten, harassed, discriminated against, threatened, thrown out of their homes, dismissed from workplaces, had their properties robbed, and had their businesses bombed. In addition, Serbs took passports, driver’s licenses, jewelry (among other valuable items), and money from Bosnian families. Religious institutions were completely obliterated. Villages were raided, pillaged, and burned.”

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Book:Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina
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“If you’re trying to find your entry point to the modern movement, I encourage you to identify what issue you’re most passionate about and what talents and skills you want to bring to the fold. Before starting, see if there’s anyone already doing similar work and consider joining up with them so as not to replicate work that’s already being done. If no one is doing what you feel needs to be done, then take it on yourself. Having a community of fellow activists around you is also key to having a network of support and for building collectively. (Interview with aaihs)”

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Author:Bree Newsome Bass
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“For we the people will always be arriving a ceremony of thunder waking up the earth opening our eyes to human monuments. And it'll get better it'll get better if we the people work, organize, resist, come together for peace, racial, social and sexual justice it'll get better it'll get better.”

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Book:Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
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“...I also reminded people that when the woman accused of adultery was brought to Jesus, he told the accusers who wanted to stone her to death, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The woman’s accusers retreated, and Jesus forgave her and urged her to sin no more. But today, our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused even the Christians to hurl stones at the people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion. I told the congregation that we can’t simply watch that happen. I told them we have to be stonecatchers.”

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Book:Just Mercy
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“Rearing your children with affection and warmth is a form of activism. Honoring your word impeccably is a way to raise your voice. Performing your job with excellence - with your chin high and your standards higher - is as powerful as any protest march. Sowing into the lives of young people is a worthy crusade. That is what it means to leave this world of ours more lit up than we found it. It's also what it means to live a magnificent life, even if an unlikely one. The Father has a way of choosing the flawed to attempt what many deem improbable.”

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Book:Just as I Am
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“More often than not, universal categories have been clandestinely racialized. Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal. For most of our history, the very category human has not embraced black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male.”

RaceSocial JusticeActivismRace And Racism In America
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
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“It was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience. it was an army that would move but not maul. It was an army that would sing but not slay. It was an army that would flank but not falter. It was an army to storm bastions of hatred, to lay siege to the fortresses of segregation, to surround symbols of discrimination. It was an army whose allegiance was to God and whose strategy and intelligence were the eloquently simple dictates of conscience. Why We Can't Wait 1963”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“but the Mime protested without talking and that were the kind of activists the racist misogynist homophobic xenophobic non-claustrophobic because he worked in a nightclub owner preferred as he agreed everyone had a voice as long as they didn’t speak with it.”

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Book:A Dragon, A Pig, and a Rabbi Walk into a Bar...and other Rambunctious Bites
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“Our society is so hell-bent on expansion, power and effiency at all costs that the folks [who question things or suggest the way something's done is not right,] are inconvenient. We slow the world down. We're on the bow of the Titanic, pointing, crying out, "Iceberg! Iceberg!" while everyone else is below deck, yelling back, "We just want to keep dancing!" It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world.”

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Book:Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living / Where the Crawdads Sing / Reasons to Stay Alive
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“We are in a decade, perhaps an age, when all sorts and conditions of men are rising up to protest (declare against) all sorts and conditions in our human situation. Everywhere, the "have-nots" are challenging the "haves"; the morally awake are prodding the indifferently asleep; the impatient are threatening the patient; both the Left and the Right are attacking the Center; the new thinks, that it despises the old. In a well-worn sense, "whatever is" is wrong. The current traitor is the middle class, and treason is gradually being defined as the liberal view. The choice offered seems to be be either a soma-soaked brotherly "happening" with Whirl as benevolent king or the orderly, albeit vicious, tyranny of Orwell's 1984. Within our own borders the arenas are brimming and booming: inner city ghettos, rural slums, local draft boards, P.T.A. committees, factories exuding smog, churches gathering affluence, campuses and coffee houses, Selma and Cicero, the Mississippi Delta and the cities of Detroit and Newark, nuclear test sites and pornographic paperbacks. Under attack are segregation, the war in Vietnam, control of the universities, inequalities in selective service, Christian hypocrisies, second-class citizenship, white collar culture, poverty, river pollution, and the BOMB.”

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Book:Poems of Protest Old and New
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“...but I'm also talking about the colonizing of truth, the redesigning of the fabric of reality. I am talking about the imposition of a way of classifying, measuring, and quantifying the world, including everything from time, to temperature, to distance, to weight. All of these things became calculated and bounded by frameworks that were not only European but often peculiarly English ways of understanding reality. Today's activism responds to the world on these terms, operating on terrain already mapped out by white supremacy, Eurocentric logic, and colonialism. This would be less worrying if it was clearly identified, would not pose so grave a danger if there was awareness that the terms of engagement operate within a framework that we need to dissolve. However, that acknowledgement appears to be entirely absent, and we congratulate ourselves on 'speaking truth to power' (often, depressingly, via what we know call 'platform capitalism').”

RaceRacismActivismColonialismWhite SupremacyIdentity PoliticsAntiracismEurocentrismRace Theory
Book:What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice
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“That does not mean, however, there should be no consequences. It means real consequences. Consequences that really matter. It means transforming the conditions that exist in the first place for this to even have happened. It is really critical for people to think about the difference between punishment and consequences. Punishment often is actually not the same as transformation. Even though it feels good to wear the “kill the rapists” T-shirt, that isn’t the thing that is actually going to get us the world we want to live in.”

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Book:We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
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“Activist organizations have managed to infect much of the information that is available relating to both gender and biological sex. Any research studies that are not in agreement with this agenda are ignored as though they never existed. Whether it’s health websites, research publications, or media articles, it really is a jungle out there. If what you are looking for is basic, foundational information, anything older than ten years old is probably safe. Anything published in the last few years is questionable.”

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Book:The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society
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