20th-century Activist Quotes

The counters stepped up; the pen started its upward rise. It showed no tendency to level off. A chain reaction was taking place in the pile. In the back of everyone's mind was one avoidable question, "When do we become scared?"

And suddenly the circle came together for me. We were as a civilization making one big mistake, a mistake that was understandable because we had been raised to make it. We had been culturally indoctrinated to believe it to be not a mistake at all, but rather a normal and healthy habit. But this mistake was killing us as individuals just as it was destroying our land and our forests and our rivers. We were eating dead animals, and it wasn't working. If those animals had set out to take their revenge on us, they couldn't have done a better job.

We will join hands with you as women of this country.... We will kneel-in, we will sit-in until we can eat at any counter in the United States. We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States. And we will sit-in, and we will kneel-in, and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote.

Daisy Bates (activist)

.. first in myth, later in reality, passion and violence watered my root soil.

I'm convinced nonviolence can be successful in working for positive change in our relations with other countries right now.

Politics is not just about voting one day every four years. Politics is the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the road we walk on.

Unita Blackwell

I have never heard of a tradition among Jews that encourages us to support each others' differences. Quite the contrary. What I've always been taught is that Jews forever see each other as bitter enemies whose differences are irreconcilable.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The part is greater than its role in the whole.

Living on the creative edge means daring every day to dream of a world beyond the socially constructed barriers that imprison and divide us.

Violence, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the anarchist philosophy. It has repeatedly been pointed out by anarchist thinkers that the revolution can neither be won, nor the anarchist society established and maintained, by armed violence.

Vernon Richards

I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within.

It is the job, the task of all democrats, wherever we are located, to advance this idea: That nothing short of full freedom will satisfy us.

If I'm called a criminal for advocating that people have the right to defend themselves, for telling them to get off their asses and fight for what they deserve. If that's criminal, then I hope that I'll always be a criminal.

Robert F. Williams

I want the state to take away people's guns. But I don't want the state to use methods against gun owners that I deplore when used against naughty children, sexual minorities, drug users, and unsightly drinkers. Since such reprehensible police practices are probably needed to make anti-gun laws effective, my proposal to ban all guns should probably be marked a failure before it is even tried.

I'd rather be a born-once hog than a born-again Christian any day...

The Food and Drug Administration cannot spend the money to supervise these "honest" manufacturers too carefully.

Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides.

Priscilla and I, and nine others, had been charged with
'disturbing the peace,' among other charges, because we tried to order food at Woolworth. If not for segregation, and the fact that we were all Negroes, we would have been served without incident. At our trial on March 17, 1960,
Judge John Rudd ruled that our lawyers should
'get off that race question.'

Patricia Stephens Due

The foundation is an instrument forged by citizens who transfer profit from the commercial sector and put it directly to work as risk capital for the general betterment of the society.

Richard Cornuelle

We want to be masters of our own destiny. We need no gods or emperors. We do not believe in the existence of any saviour. We want to be masters of the world and not instruments used by autocrats to carry out their wild ambitions. We want a modern lifestyle and democracy for the people. Freedom and happiness are our sole objectives in accomplishing modernisation.

The image of God, then, involves gender identity and complementarity. God created gender in duality as male and female.

Andrew Comiskey

All revolutions are impossible until they happen. Then they become inevitable

I appeal: Learn with me the lessons of history and of grace, so my children will not be afraid to say the word 'AIDS' when I am gone. Then, their children and yours may not need to whisper it at all.

Mary Fisher (activist)

I reject the notion that technology is a neutral thing, so I see it as creating new capabilities for humanity. But then, these capabilities can be an object of conflict.

Case officers most fear the US ambassador and his staff, then restrictive headquarters cables, then curious gossipy neighbours in the local community, as potential threats to the operation. Next would come the local police, then the press. Last of all is the KGB.