Quotes About Activism

They went up against white mobs, water hoses, vicious dogs, the Ku Klux Klan, trigger-happy nightstick-wielding police, armed only with their belief in justice and their desire for freedom.

Fascist governments do not permit revolutionary or progressive operation groups to exist, no matter how peaceful or nonviolent they are. It doesn't matter whether the fascist government simply outlawed the groups like in Nazi Germany or mounts a counterintelligence campaign to destroy opposition groups like in the U.S.

As far as i was concerned, the police in the Black communities were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people at whim and without restraint. I despise violence, but i despise it even more when it's one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.

At the time, Alcatraz had been taken over by Native Americans who were protesting against a long series of broken treaties, genocidal policies, and racist exploitation.

Any people seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other people's freedom as well

Angela Davis was running for her life. They had hooked her up with Jonathan Jackson, charged her with kidnapping and murder at the kourthouse, even though she was nowhere on the set.

When Angela Davis came to new jersey to do a speaking engagement on my behalf, the new jersey prosecutor's office ambushed her and her party, harassing them until the moment they left the state.

We found out later that a lone Black juror had refused to convict us. He had heard us.

Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples' freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people. Each time one of imperialism's tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation.

Judge Bachman

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has gotten their freedom, by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them

I knew I didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell was going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.

Arrogance was one of the factors that kept the white left so factionalized.

Je suis féministe parce que je suis Algérienne

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

If I was afraid of being killed, I would never speak out against the government.

I do protect human rights, and I hope I shall always be looked up as a champion of human rights.

The Nobel Peace Prize opened up a door in my heart.