Peoples do not defy repression and death, nor do they remain for nights on end protesting energetically, just because of merely formal matters.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that’s been discriminated against, knows what it’s like.

Nothing is being done to stop the climate and ecological emergency from happening and to secure the future wellbeing for future generations.

I think the self-burning itself on practice of non-violence. These people, you see, they easily use bomb explosive, more casualty people. But they didn’t do that. Only sacrifice their own life. So this also is part of practice of non-violence.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.

Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself.

Our whole life is set up in the path of least resistance. We don’t want to suffer. We don’t want to feel discomfort. So the whole time, we’re living our lives in a very comfortable area. There’s no growth in that.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‚our‘ country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

Dying is a wild night and a new road.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

In every parting there is an image of death.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

What I’m asking for is hard. It’s easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn’t possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don’t matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.

The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

Fixing a broken immigration system. Protecting our kids from gun violence. Equal pay for equal work, paid leave, raising the minimum wage. All these things still matter to hardworking families; they are still the right thing to do; and I will not let up until they get done.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world.

The ancients considered mechanics in a twofold respect: as rational, which proceeds accurately by demonstration, and practical. To practical mechanics all the manual arts belong, from which mechanics took its name.

The ‚peace movement‘ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine.

Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that changed their abortion laws before Roe are not going to change back. So we have a policy that only affects poor women, and it can never be otherwise.

The battle for women’s rights has been largely won.

Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

Obviously, there’s a part of me that takes the world of violence and death very seriously. However, when it comes to protection, or when it comes to just the skill of shooting… I’ve gone to the range with sniper rifles and things like that.

I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

If people don’t vote, everything stays the same. You can protest until the sky turns yellow or the moon turns blue, and it’s not going to change anything if you don’t vote.

My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression – thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.

I am well aware that there are prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union, including some who have said they have chosen to resist the law because of religious reasons.

I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I got involved with the Nelson Mandela concerts. I got involved with debt cancellation because Desmond Tutu demanded that the world respond to that situation.

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.