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

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

So people are talking about revolution. What a revolution it would be to have a woman president.

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.

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

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.

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

The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we’ve got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

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.

In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married – we became an interracial couple.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

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

It would make everything I worked for meaningless if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

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

In a time not distant, it will be possible to flash any image formed in thought on a screen and render it visible at any place desired. The perfection of this means of reading thought will create a revolution for the better in all our social relations.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.

Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone, is worth nothing.

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.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

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

That old law about ‚an eye for an eye‘ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

No thieves, no traitors, no interventionists! This time the revolution is for real!

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.

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

You’ve got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

What really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution – this revolution – is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing.

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

We can’t afford to be killing one another.

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

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

Four legs good, two legs bad.

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.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

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.

I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.

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.

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.

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.

Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I will never retire from politics, the revolution, or the ideas I have.

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

A revolution can be neither made nor stopped. The only thing that can be done is for one of several of its children to give it a direction by dint of victories.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

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.

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated on the job.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest.

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