Income inequity has to be addressed.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

You can’t put democracy and freedom back into a box.

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.

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?

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.

Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It’s not a popular position.

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

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.

I’m a warrior for the middle class.

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother’s Keeper, I’m personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.

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

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

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

If you want to appeal to everyone, you can’t do a world tour and expect black people to show up at every date – when you’re in Australia, when you’re in Dubai, when you’re in Indonesia.

Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

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

A little over 5% of the world’s population produces almost 29% of the world’s goods and services.

The Lord commonly gives riches to foolish people, to whom he gives nothing else.

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.

We can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

We know that for every 1 person who get access to the Internet, one new job gets created, and one person gets lifted out of poverty. So in theory, going and connecting everyone on the Internet is a large national and even global priority.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

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

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

Wealthy men can’t live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.

I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.

Those who ‚abjure‘ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.

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

It’s always going to be a fight for anyone who isn’t an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn’t have a fight.

You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that’s something that we should think about.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute – a white skin.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

I used to always fight for human rights. I still fight for Leonard Peltier, who’s spent 35 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

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.

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

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

Most poor people live in the poorest countries.

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

I just think that – when a country needs more income and we do, we’re only taking in 15 percent of GDP, I mean, that – that – when a country needs more income, they should get it from the people that have it.

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

And we have done more in the two and a half years that I’ve been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it’s ending ‚don’t ask, don’t tell,‘ making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

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.

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.

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.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

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.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

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.

Now, anybody who thinks that we can move this economy forward with just a few folks at the top doing well, hoping that it’s going to trickle down to working people who are running faster and faster just to keep up, you’ll never see it.

We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.