Quotes About Activism

The question tonight, as I understand it, is "The Negro Revolt, and Where Do We Go From Here? or What Next?" In my little humble way of understanding it, it points toward either the ballot or the bullet.

Be nonviolent only with those who are nonviolent to you. And when you can bring me a nonviolent racist, bring me a nonviolent segregationist, then I'll get nonviolent. But don't teach me to be nonviolent until you teach some of those crackers to be nonviolent.

The boycotts against Hearst's newspapers were soon expanded to include his newsreels. At Williams College, then at Amherst, then elsewhere, students booed the Hearst newsreels—at Amherst, they drowned them out with cries of "We Want Popeye! We Want Popeye!"—and picketed the theaters that carried them, forcing theater owners to protect themselves by removing the name Hearst from the titles.

For fourteen years, Martin Luther King, Jr. lived in the valley of the shadow of death. He was stoned. He was stabbed. His home was bombed. He did important work despite the knowledge that people plotted his death. He sacrificed his safety, not his life. Stop saying that he gave his life, offered himself as a sacrifice. That is a lie. He was murdered.

Funneling anger is risky business. Anger is a powerful fuel, and one could argue that much social change has resulted in no small part because of angry voices. In my half century of living, however, I have seen too many activists become frustrated and worn out—made callous by failed attempts to make change, with their idealistic passion devolving into seething anger, or worse, thick hatred.

I am glad to see so many young people thinking about social justice. I have been woke since the doctor slapped my ass.

No one is asking police officers to beat white protestors like they beat us. We want them to not beat us like they don't beat them

You don't have to be black, brown, red, or yellow to do good research about the experiences of people of color. You don't have to fabricate a racial/ethnic identity to be a researcher--or even an activist. Knowledge belongs to all of us. Activism belongs to all of us. Stop centering yourselves in the lived experiences of people of color. Just do the work that needs to be done.

Young visitors to the museum ask me, "What was it like to live during the civil rights struggle?" I gently tell them that we are living during the civil rights struggle. -David Pilgrim

In his 1986 autobiographical work, Confessions of a Theologian, Carl F. H. Henry, dean of twentieth-century American evangelical theologians, lamented that several Christian colleges and universities had started to veer away from the centrality of their work, by and large giving up the cognitive focus on Christian thought in favor of Christian piety and activism.

Wendell Phillips declared: "Only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.… Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated.

He had a wide-ranging knowledge of antislavery activism. He shared the loathing of slavery that was the common denominator among all its varieties, including Garrisonian radicalism, the evangelicalism of the Beechers and Finneys, Transcendentalist individualism, and the political approach of the Liberty and Free Soil Parties. Of the varieties, he strongly preferred the latter

Riverkeeper and other organizations have demonstrated, time and again, that some governmental officals, from the EPA and the state DEC to mayors, local councilmen and woman, routinely protect polluters and subvert the public interest.

Religion does not own activism.

The more, and the louder, we come out today, the easier it will be for those who can't do so until tomorrow.

A little anger is a good thing if it isn't on your own behalf, if it's for others deserving of your anger, your empathy.

Veganism is merely the continuation of Christianity by other means. It's the Sermon on the Mount extended from the poor, weak and meek to animals. It gives every vegan the opportunity to posture as a Messiah, saving the poor little animals from Leviathan. Vegans are addicted to having a Messiah Complex. The powerless often posture as activists on behalf of the even more powerless. It makes them feel better about themselves.

We set ourselves to achieve a society which would be maximally-tolerant. But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally-intolerant society. It also, and more importantly, paralyzes our powers of resistance to them.

I came at age in the '60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.

I never could stand racism or indifference to poverty. That doesn't make me a lefty ideologue. It makes me an ordinary American.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began working like real nuns, raising money for the sick at church bingos and organizing a charity dog show featuring Shirley MacLaine as emcee.

Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a "dinner-bell, with which in hand I passed through the principal streets," he recalled, "ringing the bell and crying out, 'Notice! Frederick Douglass, recently a slave, will lecture on American Slavery, on Grafton Common, this evening at 7 o'clock."13

If silence equals death, he taught us, then art equals language equals life.

His senior year, he started a garage band that was quickly banned from every club, bar, park, and concert hall in the region due to his insistence on playing a song called, "This Venue Is a Front for Human Trafficking, Someone Call the FBI, this Is Not Just a Joke Song Title.