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

Everyone got kind of crazy with me mentioning I was in love with a woman.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

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.

When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights.

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

In terms of my involvement in ‚don’t ask, don’t tell‘ and marriage equality and anti-bullying and social emotional learning in schools – these are all things that arise out of my relationship with the world and with my fans.

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

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

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.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

No one can say, ‚I have dropped out – I am no longer in the system.‘ When you’re in prison, you’re even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don’t transform the system as an absolute thing.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

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

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

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

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.

A calling is you feel – you look out and see the need – maybe it’s the need for the poor, to help poor people. Maybe it’s the need to get involved in the race problem, as Martin Luther King was – felt called.

We can’t afford to be killing one another.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

We live in a bewildering world.

We’re a diverse society, and I think the TV is doing a great job in showing that we’re all human beings, that we can all get along, that we can all be together, and I think that’s a marvelous thing.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Children are all foreigners.