Quotes About Activism

We were marching against the humiliation of the fact that your money can't buy a hot dog, can't rent a Holiday Inn. It was sense of the dollar dignity. We weren't fighting just to be with white people.

We've mistaken King's nonviolence for passivity. We've forgotten that his approach was more aggressive than anything the country had seen—that he used peaceful protest as a lever to force those in power to give up many of the privileges they'd hoarded.

In an essay for the Saturday Review, a magazine that appealed to economically comfortable, upper-middlebrow readers, King wrote: "The flames of Watts illuminated more than the western sky; they cast light on the imperfections in the civil rights movement and the tragic shallowness of white racial policy in the explosive ghettos.

Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules. To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations.

Los estudiantes universitarios de hoy han vivido unos tiempos extraordinarios y, en consecuencia, muchos de ellos han desarrollado una extraordinaria pasión por la justicia social.

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

Amateurs and single-issue activists have their uses, but without hacks the machine fails, which is why it puts such a premium on people who pay their dues and work their way up the ranks.

Activists demanded that economists pay more attention to inequality, which economic development had often seemed to exacerbate.

Looking back in 1964, King observed, "Negroes have straightened their backs in Albany. And once a man straightens his back you can't ride him anymore.

Instead of sitting down at lunch counters, Wallace vowed to stand in the entranceway to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama.

It's to be a person who's able to shoot little arrows into sacred cows and knock politicians off their pedestals, to look out for hypocrisy, advocate for all sorts of things from social justice to peace.

If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution.

If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics.

I care about politics just like any other citizen. I'm against the war in Iraq, or any type of war.

activismo y actividad. En el primer caso, uno se mueve intensamente de acá para allá, pero con poco fruto, es un movimiento que se hace de cara a la galería, de escasa productividad, que suena mucho hacia fuera, pero tiene pocos resultados. En cambio, el segundo es menos ruidoso, pero más efectivo: labor callada, lenta y de resultados prometedores.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it's easy to understand the inspiration for its anger as well as its impatience.

It's my duty as a human being to be pissed off

I think every form of art should be political.

Black troops helped construct schools, churches, and orphanages, organized debating societies, and held political gatherings where "freedom songs" were sung and soldiers delivered "speeches of the most inflammatory kind.

hard for me to hear the constant refrain of "just preach the gospel." When the topic is abortion, nobody says, "just preach the gospel." We preach against abortion as if it's a gospel issue. When the topic is sex trafficking, no one says "just preach the gospel." We develop a battalion to go and get people out of sex trafficking. And we should because these are crucial issues. But so is racial justice!