I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, and anti-racism.

Even if the politics needed doesn’t exist today, we still need to use our voices to make sure that the people in power are focused on the right things. Because this is a democracy, and in a democracy, people are the ones who run the country.

A right delayed is a right denied.

America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus‘ famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college. And, you know, part of my job, that I can do, I think, without any potential conflicts, is to get at those root causes.

We don’t want two-tier people in America. Those who are legal but not citizens, and citizens.

What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

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

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.

I’m not for gay marriage, but I’m not for discriminating against people.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.

All men are equal before fish.

I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, ‚Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what’s the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?‘

Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing.

Civil disobedience’s main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.

Particularly conservative Christians, I was very angry that they were not involved more in the AIDS emergency.

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

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

There is but one stage for the peasant and the actor.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Women should be obscene and not heard.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

Democracy… is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

A gender line… helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due.

I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

High-quality early-childhood programs and health coverage have expanded, and the number of mentoring relationships for at-risk youth has risen dramatically. That progress is encouraging, but it’s not evenly distributed.

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

We must make it clear that a platform of ‚I hate gay men and women‘ is not a way to become president of the United States.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

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

The best thing about my protest has been to see how more and more people have been coming and getting involved.

We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don’t think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths.

We can no longer save the world by playing by the rules.

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

I’m not focused on the gay and lesbian movement.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

I am such a political person.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.

The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

We have an idea that we Americans are God’s chosen people, that God loves us more than any other people, and that we are God’s blessed. I tell you that God doesn’t love us any more than He does the Russians.