Quotes About Activism

You never cared enough to be Black

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, Will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will not be re-run, brothers. The revolution will be live.

The revolution will not be televised

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, Will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be not re-run, brothers. The revolution will be live.

I'd say it's time for women to make a stand. And it's far, far easier to make a stand when you're wearing comfortable shoes.

Thomas Paine was kind of the oh, I don't know. My apologies to Thomas Paine, but kind of the me of the genera I mean, I can't think of anybody else. A guy just saying, "Hey, really, stand up. Come on. We can do it." He was kind of the he was the media guy, really. He just did pamphlets, the rest of us just do TV.

I wouldn't be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and firehoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, some of us go to jail just like Martin Luther King did on trumped up charges. Tough times are coming.

My civil rights will not be trampled, and I say this not for me but for my children, and all those who yearn to breathe free. Those who make your Apple products at Foxxcon, those who languish in prisons in Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela. Those homosexuals who are stoned to death in the streets of Egypt or Iran, while our so-called civil rights leaders hold coffee klatches with third graders in the White House.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, they were all "doing something wrong": political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistle-blowing, of activism, of political journalism.

Progress both in the United States and other nations was only ever achieved through the ability to challenge power and orthodoxies and to pioneer new ways of thinking and living. Everyone, even those who do not engage in dissenting advocacy or political activism, suffers when that freedom is stifled by the fear of being watched.

The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

no one ever got radicalized by being grateful

If someone called me a lesbian—in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians—I learned just to say, "Thank you." It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh.

Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!

Feminism is memory.

Voting isn't the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.

We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful. p176

For women, the only alternative to being a feminist is being a masochist.

Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.

Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production.

I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.