For years, decades, the system has taught us to stay quiet. They’ve made us believe that those who take to the streets to speak up are crazy, criminals, troublemakers.

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.

I always have been an activist for things that were just authentically a part of my life, that I felt connected to.

White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

Our veterans who fall on hard times and find themselves without a home deserve more than just handwringing or kind words. They deserve real help that gets them back on their feet.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.

Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.

Man, all lives matter.

To like an individual because he’s black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn’t white.

I was born realizing the flaws in the criminal justice system.

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

It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

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.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that’s terrorism, too.

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.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

I have always fought for concrete facts, for justice.

I was not an activist.

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight.

Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.

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.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

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.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

It’s empowering to know I am doing something, I am taking a stand, I am disrupting.

I love being in a courtroom.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.

Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.

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

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

Blacks, especially in America, have been raised with a slave mentality – they don’t feel that they have the right to speak as loud as possible.

‚Whole Women’s Health‘ made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn’t in her.

I wish I could say to all those people who consider themselves anarchists or radicals: Please join the nonviolent movement. This is how Gandhi freed India. If Gandhi freed India, we can certainly free the United States from our racism, misogyny, and bigotry.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can’t or won’t see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.

One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that people tend to think – even the activists – that instant gratification is required. You constantly hear: ‚Look I went to a demonstration, and we didn’t stop the war so what’s the use of doing it again?‘

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

I was a proponent of the ERA.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

I’ve been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

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

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

Black people in America, people from the struggle, immigrants, it’s no generational wealth that we are attached to, so we are tasked to create – in one generation – closing the gap. That’s why we so Doomsday about getting to the check: ‚cause it’s life or death for real.

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