Quotes About Activism

Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.

When I was 12 years old, I got involved with an organization called Artists for a New South Africa. One of its missions is to help with HIV/AIDS awareness.

I'd been to South Africa during the Seventies, when it was definitely not kosher to go there. I felt that the best thing to do was to be a missionary and tell people what was going on in their own country because censorship was so dreadful.

As Miss South Africa, I cannot wait to make a contribution to important social causes.

The only continent where social movements have led to political parties that have pushed through serious social and political reforms is in South America.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was vigorously and vociferously opposed by the Southern states. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law nonetheless.

Let's help take back our country with our wallets, and don't forget to contact your senators and congressman to let them know that you don't want amnesty for illegal aliens, that you want them to restore our borders and our sovereignty.

I have a platform, and I can help. I can be in spaces that reporters will never be in because I'm a protester.

One thing that is great about India is the freedom to speak and the spaces available in our democracy to protest which doesn't exist in many places in the world.

True love for our nation will compel us to shout on the streets and get on our knees and ask people to repent

In 1965, as Ralph Gleason has reported, when Martin Luther King's march on Selma, Alabama, was brutally attacked by local and state constabulary, Louis Armstrong, then in Copenhagen, said after watching the carnage on television, They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.

Hayden shouts, To the new Teen Uprising!

I've had enough of organizations for a while, no matter how good the cause. I prefer being a free-agent rabble-rouser. Dan

This did not mean that he had not been active in his own cause. On the contrary, he had been on the telephone all night, every night, feeding his advocates facts and phrases, suggesting sources of support and information, organizing telephone and mail campaigns, and above all guiding and nurturing journalists by reminding them, by tone of voice and vocabulary—though never in so many words—that he was the enemy of their enemies.

Be realistic, demand the impossible!

The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated.

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.

In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.

It is appropriate that we celebrate Martin Luther King, a man who struggled so valiantly to restore humanity to the oppressed and the oppressor.

I remember the philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked why he spent his time protesting against nuclear war and getting arrested on demonstrations. Why didn't he continue to work on the serious philosophical and logical problems which have major intellectual significance? And his answer was pretty good. He said: "Look, if I and others like me only work on those problems, there won't be anybody around to appreciate it or be interested.

All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America—the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, and the civil rights movement—developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality, and democracy are just that. Only when ruling elites become worried about survival do they react. Appealing to the better nature of the powerful is useless.

Those who resist refuse to kneel before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you are treated like the oppressed.

The civil rights movement was not a mirage... It was live and in living color.

The people of Missouri's First District elected a Ferguson-made activist to the House and I have brought the same energy from the frontlines of Ferguson to the halls of Congress.