Quotes About Activism

Wherever I went and spoke about menstrual hygiene, I was beaten up by people. I used to cover my cheeks with both my hands whenever I went to speak on the subject, so how could I ever imagine that someone would make a film on such a topic?

Some laws are wrong, and we have an obligation to speak out against those laws wherever they are.

I really consider my goal is that, wherever I am in life, I want to be a social advocate.

Wherever there was injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion.

Wherever there are communities fighting for freedom and liberation, there are serious tensions.

I am often asked what it is like to be on the 'front line.' But I do not use the term 'front line' to describe us, the protesters. Because everywhere in America, wherever we are, our blackness puts us in close proximity to police violence.

Everybody in the black community must organize, and then we decide whether we will have alliance with other people or not, but not until we are organized.

Before we went on any protest, whether it was sit-ins or the freedom rides or any march, we prepared ourselves, and we were disciplined. We were committed to the way of peace - the way of non-violence - the way of love - the way of life as the way of living.

Every once in a while, I get mad. 'The Lorax' came out of my being angry. The ecology books I'd read were dull... In 'The Lorax,' I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

Negroes are in no mood to shoulder guns for democracy abroad while they are denied democracy here at home.

Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We're going to have to struggle. We're going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we're asking for peace, they are a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers, and they don't even understand what peace means.

What I did at Ole Miss had nothing to do with going to classes. My objective was to destroy the system of white supremacy.

We need someone who will stand up and speak up and speak out for the people who need help, for people who are being discriminated against. And it doesn't matter whether they are black or white, Latino, Asian or Native American, whether they are straight or gay, Muslim, Christian, or Jews.

In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.

I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro.

Nobody black had learned anything from the 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.

Thank God for the efforts of Black Lives Matter - we've seen an awakening in this era in a way we didn't see in Daddy's era in terms of people coming to grips with white privilege.

I've always hated being hemmed in or seeing anybody being hemmed in. Even when I was the smallest child, I couldn't bear being told I couldn't drink at a so-called white drinking fountain.

Mobilize your friends and neighbors to understand that your day-to-day involvement with local government matters far more than a referendum on the White House every four years.

It's time for women to wake up, to use the power of the vote, to honor the suffragists who chained themselves to the White House fence so that women could vote.

Politically at that time, with Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the White House, it wasn't looking too great for the Left. And we were always on the left.

I can call a march, and thousands come out, and I happen to have access to the White House at the same time.

On Tuesday 26 July 2011, I was arrested in front of the White House along with a dozen other pro-immigrant advocates and clergy. We sat down on the sidewalk in front of the White House with a banner that read 'One Million Deported Under President Obama' and refused to move when the police ordered us to.