Quotes About Social justice

All white people are enemies until proved otherwise, and this applies to black intellectuals, all of us are enemies to the people until we prove otherwise.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

Telling the Parkses your father was an African chieftan has the same sound to me as the white man telling me I'm a nigger.

A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.

Bad things happen when good people do nothing.

If you camp out at the store for a TV, you are a good consumer. If you camp out for social justice, you're a dirty hippie and will be pepper-sprayed.

"Women's rights will not go back to the Dark Side!" —Ruth Vader Ginsburg

The majority of the Negroes who took part in the year-long boycott of Montgomery's buses were poor and untutored; but they understood the essence of the Montgomery movement. One elderly woman summed it up for the rest. When asked after several weeks of walking whether she was tired, she answered: "My feet is tired, but my soul is at rest."

I often quoted the lines of Sarah Grimke, one of two wonderful sisters from South Carolina, and they said to legislators in the mid-1900s, I ask no favor for my sex, all I ask of my brethren is that they take their feet from off our necks.

Among the collection of crimes of American "civilization," lynching has a special place of honor.

When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. But when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.

When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.

But I will never believe That I belong to the side with the guillotine. (You should eat the rich Even if that includes me.)

The degree to which a society is civilized can be judged by entering its prisons.

We are not that far removed from when I was chasing the record. If you think that, you are fooling yourself.... The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.

Abraham Lincoln

civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain... those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men.

Then, as now, white America was largely indifferent to even the most shocking crimes, as long as they were restricted to the black community.

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.

We ought to be free to meet and mingle, --to rise by our individual worth, without any consideration of caste or color; and they who deny us this right are false to their own professed principals of human equality.

It is unthinkable that a rich and enlightened society should permit its unfortunate members to starve in the midst of plenty; but once the justifications are admitted the difficulties still stand undiminished.

I do not understand how private schools claim that the entry of disadvantaged children will dilute merit; all that it will do is to breach the complacency and conceit of privilege. There

I actually took them all on quite handily, although I learned when I came to study the issue that I was completely wrong. I also came to believe that the war on drugs is one of the last vestiges of institutionalized racism in our society.

There ought to be a name for the kind of overwhelm that happens when you realise there are too many things to fight. If it's not environment, then it's human rights. If it's not human rights, it's women's rights. Law and order. Gun control. Invasive species. Water pollution. Tax reform. Refugee policy. Education. Health care. The list is endless.