Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Walls turned sideways are bridges.
We must always attempt to lift as we climb
Racism cannot be separated from capitalism.
A fair trial would have been no trial at all.
We are never assured of justice without a fight.
Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.
Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.
I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.
Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.
We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.
I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.
Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.
When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
We have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism.
If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.
First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.
I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.
Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.
It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals
You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.
I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing.
We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Progressive art can assist people to learn what's at work in the society in which they live.
Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.
I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.
I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.
I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.
To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.
You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
Kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.
We can't talk about the black community. It's no longer a homogeneous community; it was never a homogeneous community.
Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.
we have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance.
Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.
Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.
There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.
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.
Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.
Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery - did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.
I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way.
The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?
The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.
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.
Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.
We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.
Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.
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.
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.