Quotes About Activism

In my political life I spoke before leftist groups, before black activist groups that I disagreed with, to explain my position and to support my legislation.

That's one of the things about the Tea Party people. They think corporations have too much influence in American life and they do.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.

I too complain ceaselessly in my heart and in my words too. My very life is a protest. Against government, for instance.

Since I was a little kid, I was against fur. I never wore fur in my life.

Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That's what I've been doing all my life.

I have been very interested in labor movement. If I could have wished another life, I would have loved to be a pioneer woman in the beginning of labor movement.

I was raised in a family where we were taught that the best thing you could do with your life was to really kind of push the cause of progress and justice and human rights forward.

I wouldn't be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.

You can't just sit around and make protest albums all your life; eventually it comes to the point where you have to do something.

I've always been fascinated by activists, people who will devote their life to a cause, people who go to India and to Africa and put their life in jeopardy to do what they believe is right.

Women's issues have always been a part of my life. My goal is to bring the word 'feminism' back into the zeitgeist and reframe it.

My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy... and I believed that I didn't have really a function as an artist, as a useful artist, in that anymore.

People like passion in politics.

And the night that Chris Rock said, "Any time you find yourself on Martin Luther King Boulevard, get off.

Baldwin penned a powerful open letter to Angela Davis, later published in The New York Review of Books. He famously wrote: "We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

When residents erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, after the murder of Freddie Gray, one activist was seen outside the Western District police station with a sign quoting Baldwin: "Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.

To be sure, Cleaver's idea of himself as a virile black man was central to his politics.

I remembered working on my last book and traveling to Ferguson, Missouri, and to Raleigh, North Carolina, to bear witness to what happened there. In those spaces, I saw and heard people saying no. In their pursuit of a more just America, they made a choice to not adjust themselves to the status quo and to put their bodies on the line for a different America where black people and those on the margins of this society might flourish.

People on death row, the treatment of animals, women's right to choose. So much in America is based on religious fundamentalist Christianity. Grow up! This is the modern world!

Do you force your kids to pay attention to what's going on, or do you let them live their lives outside of it? My hope is that my child is a strong activist. That would make me most proud.

I stand for what I stand on.

I think it is far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject.

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.