Quotes About Activism

I have been unsure, from the start, what the Occupy movement was all about, although I did suspect that it was just fatuous, anti-enterprise, left-wingery.

Kids are meeting in coffee shops and basements figuring out what's unsustainable in their communities. That's the future.

Why do I leave the March for Life every year happier than when I came? Hope and gratefulness are the reasons. Gratefulness for the life we have and the life we've given and hope for the future, to live in a world where abortion becomes unthinkable.

For immigrant women, fighting for some of the standard platforms of the women's movement may feel unthinkable when deportation is staring you in the face every day.

I can't say there was a last straw because there have been so many straws, but certainly the horrors at the border, separating children from their parents, the torture, the kidnapping and the incarceration of them in cages was unthinkable, unbearable. When an opportunity presented itself to me to do something, I needed to take a leap.

In September of 2015, I did the unthinkable: I used my second-ever runway show to bring awareness to the Black Lives Matter movement. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do professionally. It was lonely.

You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights.

If a policy is wrongheaded, feckless and corrupt, I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.

Black Lives Matter was born out of our unwavering love for black people and our undeniable rage over a system that has historically dehumanized black people.

When I was fifteen, I used to run around reading 'Adbusters' and dumpster diving, trying to find ways to make the U.S. government unwind into chaos through hardcore punk and metal.

People send their kids to law school to uphold the rule of law - not to fight in the streets for justice and not to be beaten up.

My mother has always rooted for the underdog, so to speak. She has always been in support of uplifting historically marginalized and historically disenfranchised people.

In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn't white and I wasn't black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.

I have some friends who were involved in the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt.

The Stonewall uprising was a day when brave individuals took to the streets to fight back against harassment and hate, and by doing so, helped to push the long history of LGBTQ activism into a nationwide movement.

Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.

The absolute key issue is: how do you create enough political pressure? It's up to us to create that political will and there are tried and tested techniques for doing that. So we're talking about the need for civil disobedience that escalates into a rebellion and uprising.

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country wil have to upset this apple cart. We can no longer ignore the fact that America is not the... land of the free and the home of the brave.

I was so upset with what was going on in the world. I just couldn't stand the idea of being people tortured and that we even had such a thing as war. I hated the older generation, who had not done anything about it. Punk was a call-to-arms for me.

You might have noticed Harry Reid is a little upset with Americans for Prosperity. Let me tell you, when the Democrat leader is complaining about you on the Senate floor, you know you are doing something right.

I think I can speak for all four of us on the show here. We all consider ourselves to be feminists and we get very upset when people don't think we are. We're like, where did this come from? Of course we are.

My mom gets so upset at me when I say stuff in the press about anything political, and it drives me crazy because I say to my mom: 'I can't be on the side of any sort of war and I'm not going to be.'

I have always thought of myself as someone for equal rights. I don't mind being called a feminist, and I get really upset when female celebrities resist the title as if it's a bad thing, because it's a very good thing.