Quotes About Activism

Passionate professors shook her slumbering social conscience awake

What most people don't understand about Jean-Michel is that his crazy behavior had nothing to do with being an enfant terrible. Everything he did was an attack on racism and I loved him for this.

She hoped that things had changed, but she knew that they hadn't changed enough. All the demonstrations, all the consciousness-raising, all the protests, all the pickets, all the books she'd read, all the conversations she'd had, all the ballots she'd cast, all the work and here they were, still.

I cannot help thinking that if the tens of thousands of decent American men and women to whom this thing must be their country's shame, would take their courage in both hands and speak their mind, America might be cleansed from this foul sin.

the solution to America's race problem—a problem analyzed and discussed for decades by armies of sociologists, politicians and activists—is internal, not external. It is inward, not outward; personal, not social; individual, not political.

If they are truly nonviolent, they must also realize that civil disobedience is an impossibility till the preliminary work of construction is done.

To prevent the workers from going to their work by standing in front of them is pure violence and must be given up.

If I should die, and you should choose to carry on my work, you are welcome to visit my grave. Pour some water on it and shout three times. I want to hear your voice.

I have made on occasion posters and things like that for political reasons but not my work.

There are enormous opportunities to work for a world that is more free, peaceful and just.

There are all the activist groups on every imaginable topic - solidarity groups, environmental and feminist groups - sectors of these movements do very valuable work.

There will always be war, but we must always work to oppose it.

I'm a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there's a great deal of work, and I won't see the end of this.

Activism, to me, I don't know if it really works. It may work for somebody else, but it does not work for me.

You can't always measure the effects of activist work; you just have to wish and pray that the message gets through.

We come to Selma to be renewed. We come to be inspired. We come to be reminded that we must do the work that justice and equality calls us to do.

African American women actively contested white constructions of black female labor.

I'm still stuck in the Stonewall in 1968. I never left the Stonewall.

So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isn't because of Black Power, isn't because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; it's not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities.

Though some student activists of the 1960s may have idolized Alinsky, he didn't particularly idolize them.

My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement.

Well, perhaps the greatest achievement, and we didn't know it at the time, was we held an Earth Day in 1970, and out of that Earth Day a lot of students got involved in saving the environment, or trying to.

I'm just one of the kids, and all because the students at Hamilton Heights High School listened to the facts, educated their parents and themselves, and believed in me.

As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.