Quotes About Activism

it is always the oppressor, not the oppressed, who dictates the form of the struggle.

Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short-term objects of Communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements.

At the university, teachers had shied away from topics like racial oppression,

I discovered for the first time people of my own age firmly aligned with the liberation struggle, who were prepared, despite their relative privilege, to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the oppresses.

This was one of the state's most barbarous techniques of applying pressure: imprisoning the wives and children of freedom fighters. Many men in prison were able to handle anything the authorities did to them, but the thought of the state doing the same thing to their families was almost impossible to bear.

It is not my ambition to marry a white woman or swim in a white pool. It is political equality that we want.

I was a hotheaded young man who attempted to make up for his ignorance with militancy.

I discovered for the first time people of my own age firmly aligned with the liberation struggle, who were prepared, despite their relative privilege, to sacrifice themselves of the cause of the oppressed.

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people.

made a point of sitting in a Whites Only chair in the Whites Only waiting room.

Then everything changed with the Stonewall uprising toward the end of June 1969. And it wasn't all those crewnecked white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things, but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway...

I was with a group of queens, and we started walking up Christopher Street going, "Gay power! Gay power! Gay power!" We walked all the way to Eighth Avenue, and then we all looked at each other and said, "What do we do now?" So we turned round and walked all the way back down Christopher Street, still yelling, "Gay power!

The queens took the lead in the Stonewall Riots. They walked around in semi-drag with teased hair and false eyelashes on and they didn't give a shit what anybody thought about them. What did they have to lose? Absolutely fucking nothing.

People were losing jobs and agencies were losing contracts because of my exposure of this broken system. My political activism would soon lead to suffering an inordinate amount of torture, abuse, and pain — and it was orchestrated by the most powerful people in Rhode Island. "

We'll hear from him somewhere down the road. He says all that training he received in his own personal boot camp has gotten him ready. It's gotten him ready for war. It's a war with people who are trying to destroy kids' lives, says my new friend Nicholas Alahverdian.

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention

In 1792, 300,000 people boycotted sugar from the West Indies—the greatest consumer boycott in history until that point. That year, more people signed a petition against slavery than were eligible to vote in British elections.

Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn't the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little.

The best role for Americans who want to help Muslim women isn't holding the microphone at the front of the rally but writing the checks and carrying the bags in the back.

Who in conscience would not choose to stand with them and against Jamaat-e-Islami, craven Indian politicians, apartheid South Africa, Islamist Iran, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, the Tory intelligentsia, the Tory government, shabby Labour MPs playing Chicago politics, book-burners, life-deniers, witch-finders and murderers?

names of better and braver people than Assange could ever be in Afghanistan, China, Ethiopia and Belarus for their dictatorial enemies to find and charge with collaboration with the US.

anonymous blogger can print a leaked document or run a denunciation of an abuse of power. But if the abuse is to be tackled, then the blogger or the people who have read his or her work must go out and campaign for change in public.

peaceful civil disobedience can work in oppressive societies that nevertheless allow protesters to protest.

Loving a woman is always political.