Quotes About Activism

So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it."-Maya Angelou

Nothing's wrong with going to jail for something you believe in. Remember, jail was made for people. Not horses.

Baby, let me tell you what's going to happen. In a few years, there are going to be beautiful posters of Malcolm X, and his photographs will be everywhere. The same people who don't give a damn now will lie and say they always supported him.

Malcolm X was as good as his word. He said, "Black people are letting white Americans know that the time is coming for ballots or bullets. They know it is useless to ask their enemy for justice. And surely whites are the enemies of blacks, otherwise how did we get to this country in the first place?

Elevating such extraordinary figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and concentrating on their accomplishments to the exclusion of the foot soldiers who sustained the Civil Rights Movement, for example, implies that only a few people are called to change the world, especially within low-income and/or nonwhite communities, and that everyone else might as well stand aside.

I hope you will be a warrior and fierce for change so all can live.

All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.

To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

Even in the face of powerful structures of domination, it remains possible for each of us, especially those of us who are members of oppressed and/or exploited groups as well as those radical visionaries who may have race, class, and sex privilege, to define and determine alternative standards, to decide on the nature and extent of compromise.

Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.

The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.

Our] struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.

Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.

If women want a feminist revolution—ours is a world that is crying out for feminist revolution—then we must assume responsibility for drawing women together in political solidarity. That means we must assume responsibility for eliminating all the forces that divide women.

When we black people commit ourselves to living simply as a political action, as a way of breaking the stress caused by unrelenting hedonistic desire for material objects that are not needed for survival, or essential to well-being, we will not be talking about ebonics. We will be out in the streets demanding that the public schools have enough teachers so that all kids, cross color, can read and write in standard English and in Spanish too.

No level of individual self-actualization alone can sustain the marginalized and oppressed. We must be linked to collective struggle, to communities of resistance that move us outward, into the world.

Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy.

Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.

Overall women in our society are forgetting the value and power of sisterhood. Renewed feminist movement must once again raise the banner high to proclaim anew Sistehood is powerful.

No other group in America has used black people as metaphors as extensively as white women involved in the women's movement.

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.

As I encouraged black women to become active feminists, I was told that we should not become "women's libbers" because racism was the oppressive force in our lives—not sexism. To both groups I voiced my conviction that the struggle to end racism and the struggle to end sexism were naturally intertwined, that to make them separate was to deny a basic truth of our existence, that race and sex are both immutable facets of human identity.

What has become clear is that education for critical consciousness coupled with anti-racist activism that works to change all our thinking so that we construct identity and community on the basis of openness, shared struggle, and inclusive working together offers us the continued possibility of eradicating racism.