Quotes About Activism

There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things.

The dry tinder of inequality was everywhere, just waiting to be set on fire.

I was surprised to find myself in tears. Because these women had trusted me to help as a writer, I began to see a way of bringing together two things - writing and activism - that until then had torn me apart in everyday life.

Not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings, I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them, they would be taken more seriously. You white women, Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind, if you don't stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?

Many of these students have experienced the double discrimination of sex and race—not only in the mainstream but also by race in the women's movement, and by sex in the black power movement.

The personal is political. When

What Julia Ward Howe had in mind in 1870 when she invented Mother's Day for Peace was a day on which we oppose war and advance peace.

Let this message go forth from Houston and spread all over this land. There is a new force, a new understanding, a new sisterhood against all injustice that has been born here. We will not be divided and defeated again!"14

campuses not only help create social justice movements, they need them.

to making revolution, not just dinner.

As King ended his speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson call out, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did begin the "I have a dream" litany from memory, with the crowd calling out to him after each image—Tell it! What would be most remembered had been least planned. I hoped Mrs. Greene heard a woman speak up—and make all the difference.

She was a civil rights advocate. He was a feminist.

Carolyn Heilbrun's

women in such anti-abortion groups are more likely to be deprived of birth control and so to need an abortion. They

Politics don't begin in Washington. Politics begin with those who are oppressed right here.

As far as I know, no one ever burned a bra. At the 1968 Miss America Contest in Atlantic City, several hundred feminists protested on the boardwalk by putting girdles, steno pads, aprons, dust mops, and other symbols of the "feminine" role into a trash can and threatening to burn them; it was an echo of Vietnam draft resisters burning draft cards. However, they couldn't get a fire permit and never burned anything. 4

stewardesses of the 1960s had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), trying to change the "no men, no marriage" policy of their job. Aileen Hernandez, the only female or African American on the EEOC, supported them. Years later they finally won, but the airlines called the ruling "improper" because Hernandez, after leaving the EEOC, had become president of the National Organization for Women. A judge actually agreed.

You white women, Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind, if you don't stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?

Nonetheless, all the excuses of my conscious mind couldn't keep my unconscious self from catching the contagious spirit of those women who picketed the Oak Room. When I faced the hotel manager again, I had glimpsed the world as if women mattered.

Judy Collins sings about in "The Blizzard," or read Alice Walker's essay "My Father's Country Is the Poor." Each

It might be more worthwhile if we stopped wringing our hands and started ringing our congressmen.

...rights are not won on paper. They are won only by those who make their voices heard — by activists and militants. Silence never won rights. They are not handed down from above; they are forced by pressures from below.

I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm's—raised and fisted or Martin's—open and asking or James's—curled around a pen. I do not know if these hands will be Rosa's or Ruby's gently gloved and fiercely folded calmly in a lap, on a desk, around a book, ready to change the world . . .

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impassable with our bodies the corridors to the gas chamber. For if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.