American Activist Quotes

We are here to deliver a message to America: We are here and we will never be silent again.

David Silverman

I was learning that, even for a woman with power, the path was dotted with land mines—she's so ambitious. she's so aggressive. she's ruthless. "Funny thing," I used to say, "a man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless... all a woman has to do is put you on hold."

I believe that the hetero-normative, cis-normative, patriarchal, state-capitalist establishment is evil and must be destroyed.

We deeply need the humility to know ourselves as the dependent members of a great community of life, and this can indeed be one of the spiritual benefits of a wilderness experience.... [T]o know the wilderness is to know a profound humility, to recognize one's littleness, to sense dependence and interdependence, indebtedness and responsibility.

Howard Zahniser

I have tried to lead my life by following a belief that has guided my passage. This I sincerely recommend for all to follow: to witness an injustice and do nothing—that is the biggest crime.

Bill Bailey (Spanish Civil War veteran)

On being a black woman:

You learn not to depend on anything.... You get into a habit of surviving.

I have accepted the challenge of being a Negro in America and of being an American first.

The Journey of Reconciliation was organized not only to devise techniques for eliminating Jim Crow in travel, but also as a training ground for similar peaceful projects against discrimination in such major areas as employment and in the armed services.

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.

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

You can murder a liberator, but you can't murder liberation.

Up until now, the prospect of parole has kept us from confronting our captors with any real determination

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

The question arises whether all lawyers are the same. This is like asking whether everything that gets into a sewer is garbage.

Florynce Kennedy

America is the ultimate denial of the theory of man's continuous evolution.

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

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.

If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
Somebody has to limp it! Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

He was not ahead of his time. No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time. Each man must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else's lifetime.

Benjamin E. Mays

I am a colored woman or a Negro woman. Either one is OK. People dislike those words now. Today these use this term African American. It wouldn't occur to me to use that. I prefer to think of myself as an American, that's all!

When you're in Mississippi, the rest of America doesn't seem real. And when you're in the rest of America, Mississippi doesn't seem real.

Robert Parris Moses

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

Charles W. Chesnutt

Slavery tolerates no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of opinion.

Hinton R. Helper

In your living room, you're scared shitless. And that's just where the power structure wants you. In the middle of a riot, I've never found anybody who's chickenshit. The way to eliminate fear is to do what you're most afraid of.

If you are asking the wrong question, it doesn't matter how good the answer is, you aren't going to get where you want to go.