Quotes About Activism

While we march in the streets making our voices heard, we must also march to the ballot box. That's where the real change happens.

You never get to too big to phone bank, that's my opinion.

When someone says, 'I'm not political,' I feel like what they're saying is, 'I only care about myself. In my bathtub. Me and my bathtub is what I care about.'

The fight for democracy is a long-term battle.

You should always speak up. That's what I like to teach my fans - to be real and speak up for things you're passionate about.

Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began.

I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.

Being born gay, black, and female is not a revolutionary act. Being proud to be a gay black female is.

I get a little belligerent when not enough protesters show up at my appearances.

I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. —Words popularly attributed to SOJOURNER TRUTH, the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851

As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in a phrase drawn from the abolitionist Theodore Parker, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Bends, not swerves—but what we can miss in this cold-eyed understanding of history is that the arc won't even bend without devoted Americans pressing for the swerve.

It was, instead, about urging African Americans to draw on the traditions of the American Revolution to battle state-sanctioned white supremacy in order to claim their rightful place as citizens.

Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage.

A young person should be speaking out for what is fair, what is just, what is right. Speak out for those who have been left out and left behind. That is how the movement goes on.

Cassius Marcellus Clay of Lexington, Kentucky, founder of the antislavery newspaper The True American, commanded a crowd of about fifteen hundred in a grove in Springfield. Lincoln, accompanied by his friend Orville Browning, was there. "Whittling sticks, as he lay on the turf, Lincoln gave me a most patient hearing," Clay recalled. "I shall never forget his long, ungainly form, and his ever sad and homely face.

As Thoreau wrote in his 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience," "Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. —Words popularly attributed to SOJOURNER TRUTH, the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851

Words attributed long afterward to Sojourner Truth, who spoke to a Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, put the struggles of the day well: "I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.

He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. ("Sixty's too bright," he said, "and forty is too dim.

Sometimes, he [Congressmen John Lewis] said, you have to ask for something that you know you may not get. And still you have to ask for it. It's still worth fighting for and, even if you don't believe that you will see it in your lifetime, you have got to hold it up so that the generation that comes next will take it from your hands and, in their own time, see it as a goal worth fighting for again.

All white people, I think, are implicated in these things so long as we participate in America in a normal way and attempt to go on leading normal lives while any one race is being cheated and tormented. But I now believe that we will probably go on leading our normal lives, and will go on participating in our nation in a normal way, unless there comes a time where Negroes can compel us by methods of extraordinary pressure to interrupt our pleasure.

a goal worth fighting for

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

Choosing to eat fewer animal products is probably the most important action an individual can take to reverse global warming—it has a known and significant effect on the environment, and, done collectively, would push the culture and the marketplace with more force than any march.