Quotes About Activism

Poems have serious business to do They need to bring down presidents who Start wars they themselves wouldn't go to

It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution - real girl's talk.

You don't have to live next to me / Just give me my equality.

It's not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures- it's inevitable. But unless the process that is taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world, unless that continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

It's easy to think of things that need to be done, but they all have a prerequisite, namely, a mass popular base that is committed to implementing it.

If you abandon the political arena, somebody is going to be there. Corporations aren't going to go home and join the PTA. They are going to run things.

a time when anarchists were truly fearsome —less because they were willing to put a brick through a Starbucks window than because they had figured out how to organize themselves in a functional, egalitarian, and sufficiently productive society.

Occupy is the first major public response to thirty years of class war

If you give up every time you don't achieve the immediate gain you want, you're just guaranteeing that the worst is going to happen... You can't expect an easy victory after one protest march.

I started with reading Chomsky and slowly became very interested in anything that had to do with Israel/Palestine. Reading Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, John Berger, Tanya Reinhart, Ilan Pappé, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein . . . all became part of my daily routine.

No, there is no real Left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don't coalesce into a movement that can really do things.

I mean, it's nice to have the laws, but it's nice partly because it makes it easier to struggle for your rights-it's not that the laws give you the rights. Laws can be on the books and mean absolutely nothing

A sit-down strike is just one step short of saying, "Look, instead of sitting down, we'll run this place. We don't need owners and managers." That's huge. That could be done in Detroit and in other places that are being closed down.

Robbing the Hotel Theresa was like taking a piss on the Statue of Liberty. It was like slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.

He was jailed for inciting riots that weren't riots but peaceful gatherings.

So there's nothing inside of me, as a black man in this country, that will let me wait.

And if there is a fundamental difference between the way people perceived the world around them in the past and the way they perceive it at present, then it is perhaps best identified as follows: in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism.

Human responsibility rests on the 'activism of the future,' the choosing of possibilities from the future, and the 'optimism of the past,' the making these possibilities a reality and thereby rescuing them into the haven of the past.

Hell no! It's time to talk back now! History says it's time

Union : Not me alone-- I know now-- But all the whole oppressed Poor world, White and black, Must put their hands with mine To shake the pillars of those temples Wherein the false gods dwell And worn-out altars stand Too well defended, And the rule of greed's upheld- That must be ended.

I am a Negro and I know, being dark, I have been due in the past to see dark days, but them days is passing. All the fiery crosses in the world is not going to scare me back into where I were before the Harlem riots, Martin Luther King, Adam Powell, and Malcolm X. Also, I might include that lady, Annie Lee Cooper, who hit Sheriff Clark in the eye in Alabama. When a Southern colored woman hits a Southern white sheriff in the eye in a public place like Selma, a new day has come.

What seems to matter most to Larry Kramer is the incessant disruption of business as usual, the refusal to be silent or polite. This refusal is praiseworthy.

It is a very peculiar feeling having to go out and seek support from the straight world for something gay.

That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.