social justice quotes

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

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

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa, and if we’re honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

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.

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

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

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

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.

If I have a platform and a voice, I should use it for my people.

We don’t want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful – not only to that member of the community but the entire community.

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

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

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

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.

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 can’t afford not to educate girls and give women the power and the access that they need.

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

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.

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.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.

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.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

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.

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.

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.

The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

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.

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.

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

We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King’s success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.

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

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

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

Women should be obscene and not heard.

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

I believe that a child going without an education is a crime.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

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

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.

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 revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

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

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 hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‚race‘ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

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

I’m a warrior for the middle class.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.

If you’re white and you’re wrong, then you’re wrong; if you’re black and you’re wrong, you’re wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green – God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

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

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

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

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

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

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.

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