19th-century Activist Quotes

Annie Besant

Louis Auguste Blanqui

Margaret Fuller

Susan B. Anthony

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Errico Malatesta

Roger Casement

The working class owes all honor and respect to the first men who planted the standard of labor solidarity on the hostile frontier of unorganized industry.

Kansas had better stop raising corn and begin raising hell.

Mary Elizabeth Lease

Either Christ is a liar or war is never necessary, and very properly assuming that Christ told the truth, it follows that the State is without [in the words of Father Macksey] 'judicial authority to determine when war is necessary,' because it is never necessary.

A man is sometimes lost in the dust of his own raising.

If the government had the right to free us she had a right to make some provision for us and since she did not make it soon after Emancipation she ought to make it now.

Just so long as all our literature is pervaded with the thought that women are inferior, so long will our sex be held in a low estimate.

Lillie Devereux Blake

It is easy to win applause and approval among our people by charging every one of our shortcomings up to the white people. But, just the same, it isn't true. For instance: the white people, instead of being responsible for color prejudice among us, have done their best to discourage it by calling us all by the same contemptuous epithets and by lynching and jim crowing us impartially.

Hubert Harrison

The black race is not a race of criminals.... Whenever crimes are committed by Negroes, especially crimes of a glaring nature, a sense of shame, of regret is felt by the better elements of the race; not only because of the crime itself, but also because of its tendency to discredit the race, and to increase the already unfavorable impression which so many have of it.

Francis J. Grimké

The property of the estate owners (pomeshchiks) doesn't belong to any particular detachment, but to the people as a whole. Let the people take what they want.

Maria Nikiforova

It is not the religious beliefs, whether right or wrong, which are opposed to culture and material progress, but that belief which prohibits learning of sciences, earning one's livelihood and the ways of culture. I do not believe that there is any religion in the world which opposes these things. I would rather say that it is non-believing which inevitably leads to disorder and distortion of culture as in the case of the Nihilists.

Jamal-al-Din Afghani

There are times when sympathy is as necessary as the air we breathe.

Rose Pastor Stokes

To say that we could not work without capital is as true as to say that we could not mow without a scythe. To say that we could not work without a capitalist is as false as to say that we could not mow a meadow unless all the scythes belonged to one man. Nay, it is as false as to say that we could not mow unless all the scythes belonged to one man and he took a third of the harvest as payment for the loan of them.

Robert Blatchford

The genuine Anarchist looks with sheer horror upon every destruction, every mutilation of a human being, physical or moral. He loathes wars, executions and imprisonments, the grinding down of the worker's whole nature in a dreary round of toil, the sexual and economic slavery of women, the oppression of children, the crippling and poisoning of human nature by the preventable cruelty and injustice of man to man in every shape and form.

Charlotte Wilson

When I think of my past life, and the bitter trials I have endured, I can scarcely believe I live, and yet I do; and, with the help of Him who notes the sparrow's fall, I mean to fight for my down-trodden race while life lasts.

Sarah Winnemucca

Our object is the economic freedom of the producing classes; this ultimate goal will be attained after a long and bitter struggle; therefore, our primary task is to organize the masses and lead them in the struggle for economic freedom.

The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood.

I shall die... as I have lived, rationalist, socialist, pacifist, and humanitarian.

Henry Stephens Salt

Education and justice are democracy's only life insurance....

Nannie Helen Burroughs

How ridiculous we often are in our negations, our strutting self importance, our penchant for making labels and sticking them on people. As though labelling a person disposed of him!

There are sordid souls that eat and drink and breed and die, and imagine they have lived.

Charles W. Chesnutt

Added to the difficulty of learning to speak the language was the greater difficulty of finding terms to express the ideas which the missionary had come to convey... in many languages the most precious truths of Christianity had to force their way by bending stubborn words to new ideas, and filling old terms with new content.

Helen Barrett Montgomery

The task of organizing human happiness needs the active cooperation of man and woman: it cannot be relegated to one half of the world.

Marriage may be polygamic, monogamic, polyandric, complex according to the Oneida pattern, or other, and is true marriage (I do not say perfect marriage) so long as it promotes the happiness of the persons married, and the procreation, support, and education of children, and so long as it is founded on the joint free contract of the persons married, and remains under the sanction of the organic society of which those persons are members.

William Batchelder Greene

This, now, is the judgement of our scientific age—the third reaction of man upon the universe! This universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.

John Haynes Holmes

But, if you think that by hanging us, you can stamp out the labor movement - the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery - the wage slaves - expect salvation - if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.