Angela Davis Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Angela Davis
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Angela Davis
Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings…

Angela Davis
I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.

Angela Davis
Black women could hardly strive for weakness; they had to become strong, for their families and their communities needed their strength to survive.... Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells and Rosa Parks are not exceptional Black women as much as they are epitomes of Black womanhood.

Angela Davis
We are never assured of justice without a fight.

Angela Davis
In the heat of our pursuit of fundamental human rights, Black people have been continually cautioned to be patient. We are advised that as long as we remain faithful to the existing democratic order, the glorious moment will eventually arrive when we will come into our own as full-fledged human beings.

Angela Davis
It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals

Angela Davis
In this society, dominated as it is by the profit-seeking ventures of monopoly corporations, health has been callously transformed into a commodity — a commodity that those with means are able to afford, but that is too often entirely beyond the reach of others.

Angela Davis
Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

Angela Davis
It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.

Angela Davis
Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

Angela Davis
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo—obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Angela Davis
If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you at night.

Angela Davis
Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.

Angela Davis
The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

Angela Davis
No potential victim of the fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!

Angela Davis
Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative — these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

Angela Davis
We have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance.

Angela Davis
Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve consciousness of capitalism (I mean the feminism that I relate to, and there are multiple feminisms, right). So it has to involve a consciousness of capitalism and racism and colonialism and post-colonialities, and ability and more genders than we can even imagine and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.

Angela Davis
Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.

Angela Davis
We know that the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.

Angela Davis