Quotes About Activism

I'm a Christian and my motivation for joining activism is that I think we should be salt and light.

Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as "the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.

Timothy B. Tyson

The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement.

People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.

It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi," the NAACP declared in a 1947 petition to the United Nations. The petition, which decried "the denial of human rights to minorities in the case of citizens of Negro descent in the United States," created an "international sensation

Martin Luther

Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self.

Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.

For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one's holdings and legitimize one's greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.

Some whites made sacrifices for Negroes. Real sacrifices.' '...But they haven't been able to stop the killing either. They are outraged, but that doesn't stop it. They might even speak out, but that doesn't stop it either. They might even inconvenience themselves, but the killing goes on and on.

Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved.

Today there are people trying to take away rights that our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for: our right to vote, our right to choose, affordable quality education, equal pay, access to health care. We the people can't let that happen.

I hope to bring much more attention to important issues and change for issues and practices that are harming animals.

I don't want young people to think they can't make a difference because they don't have money.

After the murder of George Floyd, more than 950 brands began posting black squares via social media. Intended to be symbols of online activism, most of these posts came with empty statements of solidarity and commitments where few followed through.

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries, because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.

You cannot silence me or the millions of women who have gotten off the sidelines to speak out about the unfitness and shame you have brought to the Oval Office.

Your life is too precious to risk it by protesting, right?