20th-century Activist Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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?"

Autonomy is the capacity to act on principles that are one's own and one will exercise this capacity by means of a process of rational reflection on these principles. Autonomy is thought to be necessary for attributing political responsibility.

Donald Trump is right. We are at war and our homeland security and immigration policies are a complete mess. The Syrian refugee issue and the Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have kick-started a much needed debate and have brought some alarming information to the American people. It starts with basic government incompetence and the suffocating PC culture that Republican and Democrat establishment leaders are slaves to along with the liberal media.

The abstract categories of imperialism are neither exempt from the need of a foundation, nor will the fact that they are coextensive with ordinary discourse provide them with the needed foundation.

Silvia Federici

Color prejudice creates certain attitudes of mind on the part of some colored people which form color lines within the color line.

Walter Francis White

Many sacrifices are going to be exacted before we finally defeat De Klerk and his government. More and more atrocities will be committed by the erstwhile admirers of Hider and dictators of Latin America. But for us, there is no other choice but to engage them in a struggle, not just once but more than a million times.

"Now he took the music of like Mandrill, like "Fencewalk", certain disco records that had funky percussion breaks like The Incredible Bongo Band when they came out with "Apache" and he just kept that beat going. It might be that certain part of the record that everybody waits for—they just let their inner self go and get wild. The next thing you know the singer comes back in and you'd be mad."

Afrika Bambaataa

It's not one of those pretty biblical mandates like love your neighbor as yourself. But hell is not a pretty doctrine, either. There are lots of unpretty doctrines in the Bible. Yet if God wrote the Bible, I have to abide by it whether I like it or not.

With all that this country has given me, I felt it wasn't right for me to be enjoying life in Indian Hill when Marines were fighting and dying in Iraq.

Women are not little children. Women are not weak, not victims. Pleasure and danger go together, of course they do. We want the pleasure, and we can cope with danger.

Nadine Strossen

For all those calling me a traitor, I am proud of what I did and I'm glad I succeeded in what I did.

Mordechai Vanunu

People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.

Yesterday, on the 17th of May, we Norwegians celebrated our constitution day to mark the signing of Norway's constitution in 1814. Maybe it is because we are a small country: In Norway this is an important day. All over Norway children have paraded in their best clothes to the music of thousands of marching bands, and countless speeches have been made to remind each others, as fellow Norwegians, that freedom should never be taken for granted.

Andreas Heldal-Lund

I never had a low self-esteem that would make me gay. At one point, though, the reverse happened. Being homosexual led me to have a loss of self-esteem when I first became aware of society's attitudes about homosexuality.

None of us can predict when the causes we support will capture the public imagination, and our once-lonely quests become popular crusades.

Paul Rogat Loeb

And it's one, two, three what are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam!
And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates,
There ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! – we're all going to die.

Country Joe McDonald

Modi told me the last straw for him with regard to NDTV was when one of their correspondents Vijay Trivedi, accompanied him in a helicopter for an interview. When he started asking the same old insulting questions, Modi simply kept quiet and refused to respond any further. Piqued at being ignored, Trivedi spread the canard that Modi nearly threw him out of the helicopter mid-air because he had asked "tough questions". Modi says on that day he decided never to give legitimacy to NDTV by giving them an interview or responding to any questions from them. Vijay Trivedi treats this incident as a badge of honour and has boasted about it on numerous occasions—in writing.