Quotes About Activism

I've been making pieces dealing with environmental issues at least since 2004; I mean, I did stuff for the Sierra Club and the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge even back in the 1990s. But somewhere a little after 2004, Hummer hits me up. I'm like, 'Are you kidding me?'

The number of people who believe in stopping violence in the world is wildly greater than those that want to perpetrate it. When everybody has a smartphone, the ability for people to actually do something about violence goes up significantly.

William Lloyd Garrison was up there with Frederick Douglass being thrown off trains and going through what happened in the 1960s in 1840 in Boston.

I worked with James Orange and Hosea Williams as a teenager, and he's portrayed in the movie by Wendell Pierce. So, for me to be able to come in, 20 years after working with them as a teenager, and to portray Reverend James Orange in 'Selma' is mind-blowing.

The seminal right of the modern civil rights movement was the right to vote. My father fought so diligently for it. Certainly Congressman John Lewis and many others, Hosea Williams, fought for it as well.

If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country, because he refuses to leave the back of the bus.

Let me just say: Peace to you, if you're willing to fight for it.

I'm willing to throw my body in front of the bus to stop bad ideas.

The majority of people were always sitting in the stands. When I find people who are willing to go against the grain, who are willing to make tremendous sacrifices to change an unjust situation - that's what blows my mind out.

I am one who believes in the power of the people. I am inspired when I see people hit the streets, who challenge their elected officials, and are willing to stand up and fight. I encourage it.

Change comes when people are willing to commit acts of peaceful civil disobedience.

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.

In my lifetime, I have seen how greater liberty, greater justice, and greater respect ultimately does prevail, but it prevails only when people are willing to fight for it and willing to lose for it.

If you're not willing to take the political heat, then you shouldn't get into the game of land conservation, especially on a large scale.

To me, celebrity doesn't mean a whole lot unless you're willing to use it. So I wanted to use it in a different way, with my AIDS work, the human rights stuff for the gay and lesbian community and the speaking I do.

If they're willing to stand at polls for countless hours in the rain, as many did, then I should surely stand up for them here in the halls of Congress.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

You have to understand that people have to pay a price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win.

Many have fought for and even lost their lives to end segregation, to win the right to vote. It disappoints me to now have to cajole people to register and to vote.

The Internet is an important organizing tool. But the goal of a campaign isn't to use the Internet for organizing; the goal is always to win, and to change policy and politics.

We are launching a campaign called Wind, Not War, which is about the alternatives to a fossil-fuels-based economy and looking at wind, an alternative energy, as key to that in terms of issues of global climate change as well as issues of democracy.

Who is against human rights in Belarus today? Of course, no one should view human rights as the right to smash shop windows or stir up unrest in the streets.

If the State cannot survive the anti-slavery agitation, then let the State perish. If the Church must be cast down by the strugglings of Humanity to be free, then let the Church fall and its fragments be scattered to the four winds of Heaven, never more to curse the earth.

I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.