Quotes About Protest

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.1 —Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

He asked the American revolutionaries "with what consistency, or decency," they could "complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery.

This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.

The first step to stringing the boss up from a lamppost is saying the boss is a moron.

I'm not messy. I'm rebelling against folding.

Rather than arrest the assailant, white police officers hauled off a black bystander who objected to their inaction.

I didn't say that, Ziara protested, eyeing him as a sudden idea occurred to her. But I'm a practical person, and when I hear a new theory I like to give it a test. Shall we as the Ascendancy to declare war on someone? I was thinking a little smaller, she said. Come on.

I didn't say that, Ziara protested, eyeing him as a sudden idea occurred to her. But I'm a practical person, and when I hear a new theory I like to give it a test. Shall we ask the Ascendancy to declare war on someone? I was thinking a little smaller, she said. Come on.

Martin Luther

Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call "the sixties.

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

running across the street to get out of the way of mounted police meant obstructing traffic. Finally Dr. Rio. A Cadillac. A hammer. A gentle, almost reluctant arrest. After an hour's wait, no charges pressed, no write-up or interview, they gave her back the shopping bag and let her go.

Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves!" Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his diary on December 2. "This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.

A finger is a gun-- a wallet is a gun, skin a shiny pistol, a demon, a barrel already ready-- hands up don't shoot--

An evildoer may succeed in delivering injustice to the righteous but the howl of protest from within his conscience will reverberate in the ears of his soul for the rest of his life.

Your life is too precious to risk it by protesting, right?

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

Nick Makoha's first full-length collection, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree £8.99), was the 2017 debut which most excited me. Focused on Uganda during the Idi Amin dictatorship, his poetry is charged with ethical sensibility. The lines protest as they sing "the song disturbed by helicopter blades…" but they don't simplify things: they explore, and complicate. Personal witness and artistry are one. The Guardian

Don't be afraid to make a poem raw as sandpaper. And even though a million protests, twice as many feet, couldn't stop a war, get out there with your small voice, your light tread.

MY, you have a way of making me do things I don't normally do. I haven't dressed up for Halloween since the third grade (Spiderman), and though it's gotten harder over the years, I've managed to silently protest that whore of a holiday for the bulk of my life. Yet here I am in a mothball-scented dressing room at Bridgeport Costumes. The dressing room is so small that a fucking Smurf would be sweating.

it was becoming obvious that the war he had been anticipating, "in three to five years" might have already begun, as many wars do begin, he said, not with a major event reported in the news but with sufferings barely noticed: an unjust law, a murder, a peaceful protest march attacked by police. It begins, according to Leonel, with poverty endured by many and corruption benefiting the few, with crimes unpunished, a hardening of positions, the failure of peaceful means of appeal and redress.

Okay, little car, you are protesting roads. They are death traps for animals. They are environmentally unsound impervious surfaces that cause runoff. I understand this. But could we protest in the summer?

People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American war.

I was the guy who was constantly speaking out against the Vietnam War. I have no regrets about that.