Quotes About Resistance

We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and at, tempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Your silence will not protect you

Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of existence, like evening time or the common cold.

For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over the globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomises our daughters and our earth.

Don't make waves is good advice from a leaky boat.

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.

We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety

For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves.

I get a feeling that American standards are sort of an unspoken norm, and that whether one resists them, or whether one adopts them, they are there to be reckoned with

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

The image of the Angolan woman with a baby on one arm and a gun in the other is neither romantic nor fanciful

Our labor has become more important than our silence.

But this is all about how very difficult it is at times for people to see who or what they are looking at, particularly when they don't want to.

I must let this pain flow through me and pass on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against every wall and person that I touch.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Please, Mr. Engineer let a man ride the line Please, Mr. Engineer let a man ride the line I ain't got no ticket please let me ride the blinds

A nigger that ain't afraid to die is the worse kind of nigger for the white man. He can't hold that power over you. That's what I learned when I killed that cat. I got the power of death too.

Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn't want because they were free. Because

This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth: you get splinters later on.

Things oughtn't to be the way they are, altogether. But letting a madman burn down the barn is no way to improve them.

Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way , when and if you are an architect?" "Yes." "My dear fellow, who will let you?" "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

My dear fellow, who will let you? That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?