Quotes
- "I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of Being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art: the art of words."
-Ursula K. LeGuin -
"Poetry is not a luxury."
— Audre Lorde -
"Your silence will not protect you."
— Audre Lorde -
"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
— James Baldwin -
"Writers are extremely important people in a country, whether or not the country knows it."
— James Baldwin - "Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind."
— Toni Morrison - "Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable."
— Rebecca Solnit - "Freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose."
— George Orwell - "Ethics, decency, and morality are the real soldiers."
— Kiran Bedi, police officer and social activist - "The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it stops writing at all."
— Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (1982) - "The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls."
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton - "Whatever you choose to do, leave tracks. That means don't do it just for yourself. You will want to leave the world a little better for your having lived."
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg - "What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness."
— Audre Lorde - "When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed, but when we are silent we are still afraid, so it is better to speak."
— Audre Lorde - "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
—Frederick Douglass - "If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical changes in the universe."
– N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize winning author and member of the Kiowa tribe. -
"I always took for granted that the best art was political and was revolutionary.
It doesn't mean that art has an agenda or a politics to argue;
it means that questions being raised were explorations into kinds of anarchy, kinds of change,
identifying errors, flaws, vulnerabilities in systems"
— Toni Morrison - "The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself
— always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested in adversity."
— Jimmy Carter - "I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do."
—Helen Keller, 1950 - "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
— Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864 - The crowning glory of American citizenship is that it may be shared equally by people of every nationality, complexion and sex ..."
— Mary Ann Shadd Cary, to the House Judiciary Committee on the Rights of Women to Vote, 1871 - "You cannot be neutral. You must either join with us who believe in the bright future or be destroyed by those who would return us to the dark past."
— Daisy Lampkin - "Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other."
— Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose (1966-1978) - "Out of the huts of history's shame / I rise / Up from a past that's rooted in pain / I rise."
— Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise" (1976) - "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want the rain without thunder and lighting. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, and it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will."
― Frederick Douglass, "West India Emancipation" speech in Canandaigua, New York, August 4, 1857 - "What we have now is a situation where you have a demagogue who has nothing but contempt for democratic institutions unless they serve his interest. It's a kind of faux democracy which is, in fact, anti-democratic."
— Historian Sean Wilentz (From interview: https://capitalandmain.com/weve-never-seen-this-in-american-history-before ) - "When you are writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know," said James Baldwin. "The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."
— James Baldwin - "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead -
"Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."
— James Baldwin -
"Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?"
— James Baldwin -
"If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony."
— James Baldwin -
"You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there."
— Carolyn Forché -
"Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire."
— Oskar Schindler -
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
— Oskar Schindler -
"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim."
— Oskar Schindler -
"A great person is someone who uses their privilege and power for the benefit of others."
— Oskar Schindler -
"All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy."
— Alfred E. Smith -
"The essence of democracy is not simply to listen with pleasure to the things with which you agree, but to listen with civility to the things with which you disagree."
— Leonard Freel Woodcock -
"Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it."
— Howard Zinn -
"Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world."
— Howard Zinn -
"Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress."
— Howard Zinn -
"I believe strongly that an objective, scientifically created system of data is essential for a democracy to flourish."
— Janet L. Norwood -
"Activism works. So what I’m telling you to do now, is to act. Because no one is too small to make a difference."
— Greta Thunberg -
"Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world."
— Malala Yousafzai -
"No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world."
— Robin Williams -
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
— Martin Luther King, Jr -
"Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on."
— Thurgood Marshall -
"The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis."
— Thurgood Marshall -
"History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure."
— Thurgood Marshall -
"We cannot play ostrich. Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. In the chill climate in which we live, we must go against the prevailing wind. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young without jobs, education or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and the absence of moral leadership. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better."
— Thurgood Marshall -
"The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind."
— Marina Abramovic -
"If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity."
— Albert Einstein -
"The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library."
— Albert Einstein -
"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
— Albert Einstein -
"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity"
— Albert Einstein -
"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
— Albert Einstein -
"It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer."
— Albert Einstein -
"It is not enough to merely defend democracy. To defend it may be to lose it; to extend it is to strengthen it. Democracy is not property; it is an idea."
— Hubert H. Humphrey -
"Democracy is a space where speaking out is possible, one which shows: our world is various, and that, perhaps, is the final argument in its defense."
— Ilya Kaminsky -
"I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept."
— Angela Davis -
"You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time."
— Angela Davis -
"When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison."
— Angela Davis -
"If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night."
— Angela Davis -
"We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia."
— Angela Davis -
"Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't."
— Angela Davis -
"Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'"
— Angela Davis -
"History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery."
— Elizabeth Gurley Flynn -
"A labor victory must be economic and it must be revolutionizing."
— Elizabeth Gurley Flynn -
"What is a labour victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to achieve a temporary gain and not a lasting victory."
— Elizabeth Gurley Flynn -
"We're definitely in an era where the government wants to keep more secrets and it wants to come after anyone who's exposing those secrets and in many cases exposing government illegality. They're coming after the journalists and they're coming after the whistleblowers. It's not a good sign if the government is expending much energy trying to find out who journalists are talking to."
— Laura Poitras -
"Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth."
— Lucy Parsons -
"Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly before your God."
— William J. Barber II -
"It's not enough to conquer the opposition. In a nonviolent struggle, we are committed to fight on until we win our adversaries as friends."
— William J. Barber II -
"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
— Frederick Douglass -
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
— Frederick Douglass -
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
— Frederick Douglass