Quotes About Activism

I know some women's rights activists have seen so much abuse that they can't stand men, but I have a sense of empathy with the men. Without excusing the abuse they are capable of, many of them are trapped within these communities and bound by expectations they didn't necessarily ask for.

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.

In 1967 I entered Harvard as a freshman, confident - in the way that only 17-year-olds are - that I could change the world. My major was African Studies, and my plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism.

It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time.

The whole community of people with disabilities was alive, politically alive. I give Justin Dart credit for that. He traveled to every state in the country. He really made people with disabilities understand that they had some political power.

I traveled the country for a year and a half helping Hillary Clinton to try to become president.

The interaction between human rights campaigners from Pakistan and India was a big taboo in the 1980s. When we started traveling to India to increase people-to-people contact between the two nations, we knew that we would face serious repercussions back home.

Rather than allowing Roma, Travellers and homeless people to be picked off, all those of us who fear the criminalisation of trespass should join forces with them, protecting their rights while we defend our own.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

I mean you might say he had a travelling post office, but also Barney was very, very active. He was a legal officer for the NAACP and they had a lot of problems after Pease.

My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.

I do think the Tea Party position will prevail, and I am often asked: 'What has the Tea Party done and is it even still alive?' People think because there have been no demonstrations with the 'Don't Tread on Me' flag it's gone, but it hasn't.

I'm active in PAX, which is a gun awareness organization. We treat gun safety as a public health issue.

I'm tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.

We have a lot of people that are oppressed. We have a lot of people that aren't treated equally, aren't given equal opportunities. Police brutality is a huge thing that needs to be addressed. There are a lot of issues that need to be talked about, need to be brought to life, and we need to fix those.

Window-breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression of political opinion. Window-breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is treated as a crime.

We of Africa protest that, in this day and age, we should continue to be treated as lesser human beings than other races.

Animals have always been a passion of mine, being able to help them because they can't help themselves, and I think that people have treated them so badly over the years and it's just not fair. It's something I feel like I can help make a difference.

Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.

Over 17 years, I took on banks, landlords, real estate firms, local governments, anybody who treated anybody unfairly.

I believed that, in a situation where the community that I came from were being treated like second- and third-class citizens, that I had a responsibility to fight back against it. And I don't apologise to anybody for having done that. I think it was the right thing to do.

I'd like to win an Oscar and then refuse it so I can protest the way they've treated Marlon Brando.

If a government is overreacting in this way and treating you as such a dangerous threat, then you know that you are doing your job.