Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.
I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the '50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.
The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn; it's very clean and very nice.
Education is a right, it's a journey, it's a process, and it's something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.
The idea that teaching is somehow the delivery of the goods is such a misunderstanding of what actually goes on.
I'm not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I'm not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat.
I dropped out in '64. And I came back to Michigan, in '65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.
Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
I didn't respond to people thrusting microphones at me and asking me questions that were unanswerable in a sound bite.
It's not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it's the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.
I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.
I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.
That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.
I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I'd been more unifying, I wish I'd been more principled.
Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.
The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.
Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.
But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.
I wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero - I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.
I don't think saying "I was wrong here, I was wrong there" absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.
I'd been arrested many times by then. I'd been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].
Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.
One hundred years from now, we'll all be dead. It's hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.
Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.
I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base - those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.
His [Martin Luther King] last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, is a direct reference to angles, barbarism or socialism.
[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.
I was terrible student at Michigan, terrible. Because there was too much else to do. I was learning form too many other sources to go to class.
Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President - that was exhilarating.
The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.
What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.
There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.
Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren't bound by those rules. We're not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?
The rhythm of being an activist today involves a pretty simple rhythm. You have to open your eyes to the reality before you. You have to look and see.
To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.
I said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, "Action is eloquence," and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail.
[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.
I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.
I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That's what fascism was going to look like. That's what it did look like.
In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn't can you do everything; the question is, can you do anything?
I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.
When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.
The US is indeed a terrorist nation. ...It's also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.
This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.