19th-century Activist Quotes

Take us generally as a people, we are neither lazy nor idle; and considering how little we have to excite or stimulate us, I am almost astonished that there are so many industrious and ambitious ones to be found - although I acknowledge, with extreme sorrow, that there are some who never were and never will be serviceable to society. And have you not a similar class among yourselves?

Maria W. Stewart

Pathans! Your house has fallen into ruin. Arise and rebuild it and remember to what race you belong.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

Marriages might be made in Heaven, but too often they are consummated right here on earth.

Alice Dunbar Nelson

Flesh-eating by humans is unnecessary, irrational, anatomically unsound, unhealthy, unhygienic, uneconomic, unaesthetic, unkind and unethical. May I elaborate?

Our history in this country dates from the moment that restless men among us became restless under oppression and rose against it... Agitation, contentions, ceaseless unrest, constant aspiring -- a race so moved must prevail.

Timothy Thomas Fortune

I am an uncompromising pacifist.... I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family.

Rosika Schwimmer

If there must always be a laboring population distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages.

Orestes A. Brownson

The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.

Mary Harris Jones

After all there is throughout this world so far as man is concerned but a single race - the human race, kept alive by one common blood, the human blood. All other talk is at best provisional, a makeshift and only relatively true. (...) Even as it is, not even the aborigines of the Andamans are without some sprinkling of the so-called Aryan blood in their veins and vice-versa. Truly speaking all that one can claim is that one has the blood of all mankind in one's veins. The fundamental unity of man from pole to pole is true, all else only relatively so.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar