Quotes About Activism

Not voting is not a protest — it is a surrender.

Apathy among the Negroes themselves is also a factor. Even where polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference... In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.

I often quoted the lines of Sarah Grimke, one of two wonderful sisters from South Carolina, and they said to legislators in the mid-1900s, I ask no favor for my sex, all I ask of my brethren is that they take their feet from off our necks.

Sexism is a social disease.

It's better to fight for something than against something.

Be a voice for all those who have prisoner tongues.

But we are not free until all of us are free. So love your neighbor. Please treat her kindly. Ask her her story, then shut up and listen. Black Asian poor wealthy Trans Cis Muslim Christian Listen. LISTEN. And then yell at the top of your lungs. Be a voice for all those who have prisoner tongues, for the people who had to grow up way too young, there is work to be done, there are songs to be sung, Lord knows there's a war to be won.

I went to my son's graduation this weekend, and I heard a great quote I've never heard before from Albert Einstein. It was that the greatest danger to the world is not the bad people but it's the good people who don't speak out.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The book is commended to the candid attention and earnest prayers of all true Christians, throughout the world. May they unite their prayers that Christendom may be delivered from so great an evil as slavery

The great object of the author in writing has been to bring this subject of slavery, as a moral and religious question, before the minds of all those who profess to be followers of Christ, in this country.

I burned out on AIDS and did no AIDS work for a couple of years. I was so angry that people were still getting this disease that nobody can give you - you have to go out and get it!

Hope will never be silent.

But no, it's yoga pants and T-shirts with slogans like "Save the Rain Forest" on them, made only of natural fibers of course.

Lawrence Freedman

It is in prison ... that one becomes a real revolutionary.

They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.

Prominent opponents of the war, among them Dr. Spock and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, openly counseled young men to resist the draft and were indicted.

Between September 1969 and May 1970, there were at least 250 bombings linked to white-dominated radical groups in the United States. This was an average of almost one per day. (The government placed the number at six times as high.) Favorite targets were ROTC buildings, draft boards, induction centers, and other federal offices. In February 1970 bombs exploded at the New York headquarters of Socony Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone and Electronics.

Four months later, NOW was formed, with Friedan as its first president. It had only a small membership, most of whom were white, middle-class women who advocated legal equality. Then and later the organization had difficulty attracting blue-collar or minority women to its ranks, and it was cool, especially at first, to demands for sexual liberation.

Along with the booming economy, which after 1962 seemed capable of almost anything, the magnified mystique of the presidency stimulated ever-greater expectations among liberals and others who imagined that government possessed big answers to big problems. The revolution of popular expectations, a central dynamic of the 1960s, owed a good deal of its strength to the glorification of presidential activism that Kennedy successfully sought to foment.

Most important, Kennedy's commission encouraged women activists on both the state and federal levels to develop networks and to talk seriously about curbing long-standing divisions within their ranks. In this way, Kennedy unintentionally aroused expectations that encouraged a much more self-conscious feminist movement after 1964.

Many black and poor people, moreover, had become politicized by the civil rights movement and had begun to develop higher expectations from life. Some joined a newly formed National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).