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Protest Quotes

Browse 1024 quotes about Protest.

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Protest Quotes

“Ethan lifted a hand to his face as if he could see it, then pressed his palm to his cheek. He knew that the skin beneath his fingers was brown, but not like his mother's. Not like the girl on the bus who got arrested in Montgomery. Not, he was sure, like Cole Parker. He wondered if this shade of brown meant he got stares on the street but not assault; pushed down on the bus but not arrested. If it meant he was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan--but not killed.”

InjusticeProtestRacial InjusticeBlack YouthRacial Violence
Book:The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones
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“I don't even notice the mob until it's rushing toward me. They snort and pant, ash-colored jackets swirling as their arms and legs pull at the air. A few hundred of them stampede in my direction, and there’s no way to escape. I’m convinced that I’m about to be swept away. I’ll kick, I’ll struggle, but their momentum will be too much for me. They’ll carry me to justice. No escape this time. But the mob reaches me and keeps moving. They’re heading somewhere, and I just got in their way. I stop fighting, and move in the same direction as everyone else, and soon the crowd shelters me, buries me inside its raucousness.”

ProtestModern SocietySelf Absorption
Book:The City in the Middle of the Night
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“I have always believed there is great value in studying the flaws of mankind and men —even fictional characters. All of us are flawed. All of us are diminished by some form of prejudice and bias. If a fictional character is to be realistic, he must struggle with imperfections and weaknesses.”

FictionHistoryPrejudiceHuman RightsProtestBiasProtestingRevisionist HistoryFictional Characters
Book:Government, Politics, and Protest:: Essential Primary Sources
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“Changing the social order in one fell swoop, Henry Gerber wrote in 1940, is “like trying to push over a big stone wall with your skull.” It can’t be done. But “we can undermine the wall by little individual blasts and it will topple down by-and-by.” Or, as Del Shearer said in 1965, social revolution required at least “a century of subtle attack” on the dominant culture. As riots engulfed the United States in 1968, Frank Kameny saw similarities between homophiles and those Black Americans taking to the streets to express centuries of anger. “BUT,” Kameny said, “the Negro has truly explored and exhausted well-neigh, if not actually all, other avenues, and has gotten to the firm, unyielding stone wall of prejudice which blocks them. WE have run into this, but have not yet reached the end of all avenues.” Queer people soon hit the end of all avenues, crashing into an unyielding stone wall.”

ProtestQueerRiotRacism In AmericaStonewall
Book:We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride In The History of Queer Liberation
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“The unrest that took place. Somehow, we need to talk about it and address it. We need to educated and discuss on what really happen. How it started. What caused it and what fuel it. If not , we are in danger ,because there are some people who benefited from it, and they are not looking at the damage caused by it. So, they will make sure that it happens again.”

ProtestRiotQuotes And PhilosophyUnrestPolitics Or PoliticiansStrikeHuman Rights Or Civil RightsGovernment Or LawAnger Or HungerPower Or Rights
Author:De philosopher DJ Kyos
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“People weren't just angry about it. They were still afraid. Fear is a powerful, often irrational emotion, and mass fear... has the power to shake any society to its core. As long as the world remembered, they would live in fear of all cryptids-- regardless of whether or not any individual among us was truly dangerous. Of course, not everyone supported stripping cryptids of all right. But dissenters were few among a dangerous and violent many, and most ignored the problem. Submission was the only solution they could conceive of to fix my problem. But with the imprint of Clyde's fist still throbbing in my stomach I was less interested in fixing a problem than in becoming one.”

FantasyProtestUrban FantasyDissentMenagerieRachel Vincent
Book:Menagerie
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“South Sudan Here Is The Plan! One Tribe, One Clan! One Mission, Cannot Be Done By One Man! It Takes A Collective Vision! Spread Love! Stay Driven! Support One Another, Take Care Of Each Other Look Out For Your Father, Mother, Sister, And, Brother That’s The Game! We All Watch The Throne, No Tribes We Are All The Same! We Are All Kings! We Are All Queens! South Sudanese What’s Fame? So Much Chaos Together Will Fix The System One Day! The Youth By Now You All Should Say You Had It With This Nonsense! You Are The Politicians, When It Comes To Speaking Out On Behave Of Our Truth We Have No Comments! When Comes To Ideas We Are The Keys To Heaven We Are The Promise! Let’s Be Honest We Are The Ballers, We Are The Lawyers , We Are The Doctors! We Are The Artist! We Are The Scholars! Even Though We Are Blessed! Life Tested Us! Our Ancestors Warned Us The Book Of Exodus They Left Us A Message The Truth Is With The Youth!”

TruthLeadershipJusticeYouthProtestAfricaPan AfricanismFreedom FightersSouth Sudan
Author:Mandela Lugor
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“What happens to a highbrow literary culture when its fault lines-along caste, class and gender-are brutally exposed? What happens to the young iconoclasts who dare to speak and write about these issues openly? Is there such a thing as a happy ending for revolutionaries? Or are they doomed to be forever relegated to the footnotes of history? This is the never-before-told true story of the Hungry Generation (or 'the Hungryalists')-a group of barnstorming, anti-establishment poets, writers and artists in Bengal in the 1960s. Braving social boycott, ridicule and arrests, the Hungryalists changed the literary landscape of Bengal (and many South Asian countries) forever. Along the way, they also influenced iconic poets, such as Allen Ginsberg, who struck up a lifelong friendship with the Hungryalists.”

LifePoetryRevolutionProtestDissentGinsbergCountercultureMalaySixtiesSamir
Book:The Hungryalists
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“I gave my son a brief history of the pledge of allegiance. He asked a few questions and I answered them (with a Google check or two on my phone). Then he took a deep breath and said, “Mom, I don’t think I should say the pledge of allegiance anymore. Would that be okay?” All activists want their kids to magically turn into badass activists, but I wanted to make sure that this was a decision my son had come to after some thought, and that he had the reasoning to be able to defend that decision. I asked him why he didn’t want to say the pledge. “Because I’m an atheist, so I don’t like pledging under god. I don’t believe in pledging to countries, I think it encourages war. And I don’t think this country treats people who look like me very well so the ‘liberty and justice for all’ part is a lie. And I don’t think that every day we should all be excited about saying a lie.”

InjusticeProtestPledge Of Allegiance
Author:Ijeoma Oluo
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“The Nigerian government is playing with fire over this insecurity issue; they pardoned Boko haram terrorists, bandits, and terror herdsmen, but send a rapid response squad to peaceful protesters who are harmless. This is not a wise move or the right way to maintaining a One Nigeria. People should be able to protest against injustice and other things affecting their way of life as longs as they do it peacefully.”

GovernmentPeaceMurderProtestNigeriaBoko HaramLagosHerdsmenLekki MassacreSorosoke
Author:Olawale Daniel
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“Overlooked in this ominous depiction might be our country’s best- kept secret: in dealing with the most challenging issues of every gener- ation, resistance to duplicitous civil authority and its corporate enablers has defined our quintessential American story.”

HistoryRevolutionSocial JusticeResistanceCivil RightsProtestDissentAmerican RevolutionSocial HistoryJeff Biggers
Book:Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition
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“Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime. It was the crime of joining my people in a nonviolent protest against injustice. It was the crime of seeking to instill within my people a sense of dignity and self-respect. It was the crime of desiring for my people the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It was above all the crime of seeking to convince my people that noncoöperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is coöperation with good.”

JusticeCivil RightsProtestConvictionsMontgomery Bus Boycott
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honour them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means.”

DemocracyProtestFreedom Of SpeechDissentPeaceful ProtestArundhati RoyOn Terrorism
Author:Arundhati Roy
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“Birmingham has proved that no matter what you're up against, if wave after wave of black people keep coming prepared to go to jail, sooner or later there is such confusion, such social dislocation, that white people in the South are faced with a choice: either integrated restaurants or no restaurants at all, integrated public facilities or none at all. And the South then must make its choice for integration, for it would rather have that than chaos. This struggle is only beginning in the North, but it will be a bitter struggle. It will be an attack on business, on trade unions, and on the government. The Negro will no longer tolerate a situation where for every white man unemployed there are two or three Negroes unemployed. In the North, Negroes present a growing threat to the social order that, less brutally and more subtly than the South, attempts to keep him "in his place." In response, moderates today warn of the danger of violence and "extremism" but do not attempt to change conditions that brutalize the Negro and breed racial conflict. What is needed is an ongoing massive assault on racist political power and institutions.”

RaceRacismSouthCivil RightsProtestAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesInstitutional RacismNorth
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“I contend that the cry of 'Black Power' is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years." — Martin Luther King, Jr., 60 Minutes Interview, 1966”

ProtestRace In America
Author:Martin Luther King Jr.
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“When it comes to our democracy, and who we determine to have the right to vote--our most sacred of rights--patience is no virtue. We must never be patient when someone else's rights are in the balance. We cannot wait on laws, or elected officials, or anyone else. The only virtue when it comes to the right to vote is impatience.”

DemocracyVotingProtestAfrican AmericansBlacksImpatienceVoting RightsVoter Suppression
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.”

IronyProtestSurveillanceInfiltrationGdrStasi
Book:Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall
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“An idle hand is not just the devil's workshop, it is the devil's abode. He lives rent free there. When you don't provide job opportunities, intentionally deprived them of quality education and steal their future opportunities, they will come for your peace of minds. The earlier our leaders understand that these people are not just agitating for an end to SARS but everything that surround deepening state of corruptions in the country, the better they act up and effect the change. This is just the beginning of a very long journey that will reshape the state of our nation.”

CorruptionProtestIdlePolice BrutalityPolice ReformSarsYouthsNigerian GovernmentEndsarsEndswat
Author:Olawale Daniel
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“Chicken Roast Puff your plume in anger and fight, cock, delight the owner of knife smear sting with pollen and flap your wings As I said: Twist the arms and keep them bent roll the rug and come down the terrace after disturbed sleep Shoeboots-rifle-whirring bullets-shrieks The aged undertrial in the next cell weeps and wants to go home Liberate me let me go let me go home On its egg in the throne the gallinule doses asphyxiate in dark fight back, cock, die and fight, shout with the dumb Glass splinters on tongue-breast muscles quiver Fishes open their gills and enfog water A piece of finger wrapped in pink paper With eyes covered someone wails in the jailhouse I can't make out if man or woman Keep this eyelash on lefthand palm- and blow off with your breath Fan out snake-hood in mist Cobra's abdomen shivers in the hiss of female urination Deport to crematorium stuffing blood-oozing nose in cottonwool Shoes brickbats and torn pantaloons enlitter the streets I smear my feet with the wave picked up from a stormy sea That is the alphabet I drew on for letters. (Translation of Bengali original 'Murgir Roast')”

AngerProtestDissentRepressions
Author:মলয় রায়চৌধুরী ( Malay Roychoudhury )
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“Every time a court pushes back against the looming autocracy, we celebrate. But the looming autocracy often ignores the ruling of the courts. The question, day by day, becomes how well are all the institutions we need, we trust, we rely on still functioning? The answer, day by day, becomes only as well as the looming autocracy feels and hears and responds to the pushback against their destruction.”

LifePerspectiveDestructionInstitutionsProtestAutocracyPushStill Functioning
Author:Shellen Lubin
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