activists

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The higher mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial male who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her character.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
When we can't dream any longer we die.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Direct action is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.
  --  Emma Goldman
%
Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against.
  --  Malcolm X
%
There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn't know how to return the treatment.
  --  Malcolm X
%
A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.
  --  Malcolm X
%
If you have no critics you'll likely have no success.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Mecca.
  --  Malcolm X
%
You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can't hate Africa and not hate yourself.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.
  --  Malcolm X
%
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
  --  Malcolm X
%
America preaches integration and practices segregation.
  --  Malcolm X
%
History proves that the white man is a devil.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.
  --  Malcolm X
%
When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I believe in the brotherhood of all men, but I don't believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn't want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two-way street.
  --  Malcolm X
%
You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Truth is on the side of the oppressed.
  --  Malcolm X
%
If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.
  --  Malcolm X
%
America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, even eaten with people who in America would have been considered 'white,' but the 'white' attitude had been removed from their minds by the religion of Islam.
  --  Malcolm X
%
To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.
  --  Malcolm X
%
My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Without education, you are not going anywhere in this world.
  --  Malcolm X
%
You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.
  --  Malcolm X
%
When we see that our problem is so complicated and so all-encompassing in its intent and content, then we realize that it is no longer a Negro problem, confined only to the American Negro; that it is no longer an American problem, confined only to America, but it is a problem for humanity.
  --  Malcolm X
%
My black brothers and sisters - of all religious beliefs, or of no religious beliefs - we all have in common the greatest binding tie we could have. We are all black people!
  --  Malcolm X
%
Stumbling is not falling.
  --  Malcolm X
%
There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent.
  --  Malcolm X
%
America is the first country... that can actually have a bloodless revolution.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The real names of our people were destroyed during slavery. The last name of my forefathers was taken from them when they were brought to America and made slaves, and then the name of the slave master was given, which we refuse, we reject that name today and refuse it. I never acknowledge it whatsoever.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Envy blinds men and makes it impossible for them to think clearly.
  --  Malcolm X
%
If ballots won't work, bullets will.
  --  Malcolm X
%
We won't organize any black man to be a Democrat or a Republican because both of them have sold us out. Both of them have sold us out; both parties have sold us out. Both parties are racist, and the Democratic Party is more racist than the Republican Party.
  --  Malcolm X
%
You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington - wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
  --  Malcolm X
%
We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be the victims of God's divine wrath.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that we should be separate, all right, but in this separate state or separate existence, the black man should be given the opportunity and the incentive to do for himself what the white man has done for himself.
  --  Malcolm X
%
History is not hatred.
  --  Malcolm X
%
It's got to be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you're afraid to use an expression like that, you should get back in the cotton patch, you should get back in the alley.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Power doesn't back up in the face of a smile, or in the face of a threat of some kind of nonviolent loving action. It's not the nature of power to back up in the face of anything but some more power.
  --  Malcolm X
%
If you have a dog, I must have a dog. If you have a rifle, I must have a rifle. If you have a club, I must have a club. This is equality.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.
  --  Malcolm X
%
If it's lawful to have a rifle club to kill pheasants, it should be just as lawful to have one to kill wolves or dogs that are being sicked on little black babies. In fact, it's constitutional. Article Number Two of the constitution guarantees the right of every citizen to own a rifle or a shot gun.
  --  Malcolm X
%
In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.
  --  Malcolm X
%
You can't legislate good will - that comes through education.
  --  Malcolm X
%
We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.
  --  Malcolm X
%
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Nobody should teach the black man in America to turn the other cheek, unless someone is teaching the white man in America to turn the other cheek.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.
  --  Malcolm X
%
If you turn the other cheek, you can be enslaved for 1,000 years.
  --  Malcolm X
%
For me, my 'X' replaced the white slave master name of 'Little' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed on my parental forebears.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.
  --  Malcolm X
%
When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.
  --  Malcolm X
%
What is a Dixiecrat? A Democrat. A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise.
  --  Malcolm X
%
No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner. You must be eating some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.
  --  Malcolm X
%
History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.
  --  Malcolm X
%
You have to realize that up until about 1959, Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected Africa always in a negative light - jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I did a lot of things as a Muslim that I am sorry for now.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The White man pays Reverend Martin Luther King so that Martin Luther King can keep the Negro defenseless.
  --  Malcolm X
%
It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent. Everything in the universe does something when you start playing with his life, except the American Negro. He lays down and says, 'Beat me, daddy.'
  --  Malcolm X
%
In the past, the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer. If I take my hand and slap you, you don't even feel it. It might sting you because these digits are separated. But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together.
  --  Malcolm X
%
You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Power never takes a back step only in the face of more power.
  --  Malcolm X
%
What I want to know is how the white man, with the blood of black people dripping off his fingers, can have the audacity to be asking black people, 'Do they hate him?' That takes a lot of nerve.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that God, now, is about to establish a kingdom on this earth, based upon brotherhood and peace. And the white man is against brotherhood, and the white man is against peace.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Do you know what integration really means? It means intermarriage. That's the real point behind it. You can't have it without intermarriage. And that would result in disintegration of both races.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.
  --  Malcolm X
%
In the Bible, God offered the Pharaoh freedom if he would just let the oppressed people free to go to the land of milk and honey. But the Pharaoh disobeyed, and he was destroyed.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The white man, in his press, is going to identify me with 'hate.'
  --  Malcolm X
%
My father didn't know his real name. My father got his name from his grandfather and he got his name from his grandfather and he got it from the slave master.
  --  Malcolm X
%
My father didn't know his last name. My father got his last name from his grandfather, and his grandfather got it from his grandfather who got it from the slavemaster.
  --  Malcolm X
%
We who follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad feel that when you try and pass integration laws here in America, forcing white people to pretend that they are accepting black people, what you are doing is making white people act in a hypocritical way.
  --  Malcolm X
%
In the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That... was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about 'white men.'
  --  Malcolm X
%
America in its entirety is segregationist and is racist. It's more camouflaged in the north, but it's the same thing.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The American Negro has no conception of the hundreds of millions of other non-whites' concern for him: he has no conception of their feeling of brotherhood for and with him.
  --  Malcolm X
%
There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.
  --  Malcolm X
%
I want to take Negroes out of the ghetto and put them in good neighborhoods in good houses.
  --  Malcolm X
%
The Negro revolution is controlled by foxy white liberals, by the Government itself. But the Black Revolution is controlled only by God.
  --  Malcolm X
%
All I held against Jews was that so many Jews actually were hypocrites in their claim to be friends of the American black man.
  --  Malcolm X
%
White America is in the minority.
  --  Malcolm X
%
Not one black man is prominent in Brazil. The Negroes there are still at the bottom.
  --  Malcolm X
%
You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.
  --  Huey Newton
%
We've never advocated violence; violence is inflicted upon us. But we do believe in self-defense for ourselves and for black people.
  --  Huey Newton
%
The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.
  --  Huey Newton
%
Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.
  --  Huey Newton
%
Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.
  --  Huey Newton
%
We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.
  --  Huey Newton
%
The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.
  --  Huey Newton
%
You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree's fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down - bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.
  --  Huey Newton
%
I have the people behind me and the people are my strength.
  --  Huey Newton
%
I didn't get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.
  --  Huey Newton
%
Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.
  --  Huey Newton
%
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.
  --  Huey Newton
%
The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.
  --  Huey Newton
%
There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.
  --  Huey Newton
%
There's no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively - I am one with the people.
  --  Huey Newton
%
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.
  --  Huey Newton
%
I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.
  --  Huey Newton
%
If you stop struggling, then you stop life.
  --  Huey Newton
%
Malcolm X was the first political person in this country that I really identified with. If he had lived and not been purged, I probably would have joined the Muslims.
  --  Huey Newton
%
I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.
  --  Huey Newton
%
The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
  --  Huey Newton
%
I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.
  --  Huey Newton
%
My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he's just started to understand that something's wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn't bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.
  --  Huey Newton
%
The first book I ever really read was Plato's 'Republic,' and then I had to go over that five times or something.
  --  Huey Newton
%
I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.
  --  Huey Newton
%
We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community... Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
Our language is the reflection of ourselves. A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
The end of all knowledge should be service to others.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
We need to help students and parents cherish and preserve the ethnic and cultural diversity that nourishes and strengthens this community - and this nation.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
There is no such thing as defeat in non-violence.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
It is possible to become discouraged about the injustice we see everywhere. But God did not promise us that the world would be humane and just. He gives us the gift of life and allows us to choose the way we will use our limited time on earth. It is an awesome opportunity.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
You are never strong enough that you don't need help.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
There are vivid memories from my childhood - what we had to go through because of low wages and the conditions, basically because there was no union. I suppose, if I wanted to be fair, I could say that I'm trying to settle a personal score. I could dramatize it by saying that I want to bring social justice to farm workers.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
When poor people get involved in a long conflict, such as a strike or a civil rights drive, and the pressure increases each day, there is a deep need for spiritual advice. Without it, we see families crumble, leadership weaken, and hard workers grow tired.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines the kind of men we are.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
Students must have initiative; they should not be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves - and be free.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
From the depth of need and despair, people can work together, can organize themselves to solve their own problems and fill their own needs with dignity and strength.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
In some cases non-violence requires more militancy than violence.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
Without a union, the people are always cheated, and they are so innocent.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
Who gets the risks? The risks are given to the consumer, the unsuspecting consumer and the poor work force. And who gets the benefits? The benefits are only for the corporations, for the money makers.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
We farm workers are closest to food production. We were the first to recognize the serious health hazards of agriculture pesticides to both consumers and ourselves.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
If you want to remember me, organize!
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
There is no substitute for hard work, 23 or 24 hours a day. And there is no substitute for patience and acceptance.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
We learned many years ago that the rich may have money, but the poor have time.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
What we do know absolutely is that human lives are worth more than grapes and that innocent-looking grapes on the table may disguise poisonous residues hidden deep inside where washing cannot reach.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
There is no law for farm labor organizing, save the law of the jungle.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
If you really want to make a friend, go to someone's house and eat with him... the people who give you their food give you their heart.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
Since the Church is to be servant to the poor, it is our fault if that wealth is not channeled to help the poor in our world.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
Though many of the poor have come to see the affluent middle class as its enemy, that class actually stands between the poor and the real powers in this society - the administrative octopus with its head in Washington, the conglomerates, the military complex.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
The burdens of generations of poverty and powerlessness lie heavy in the fields of America. If we fail, there are those who will see violence as the shortcut to change.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
As long as we have a poor country bordering California, it's going to be very difficult to win strikes.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
Farm workers are society's canaries. Farm workers - and their children - demonstrate the effects of pesticide poisoning before anyone else.
  --  Cesar Chavez
%
They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then that we will see the rising of the moon.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
I am (even after all the torture) amazed at British logic. Never in eight centuries have they succeeded in breaking the spirit of one man who refused to be broken. They have not dispirited, conquered, nor demoralised my people, nor will they ever.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
They have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn't want to be broken.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
Everyone, Republican or otherwise has their own particular part to play. No part is too great or too small, no one is too old or too young to do something.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
I was a skeleton compared to what I used to be, but it didn't matter. Nothing really mattered except remaining unbroken.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
We wish to be treated 'not as ordinary prisoners,' for we are not criminals. We admit no crime - unless, that is, the love of one's people and country is a crime.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then we'll see the rising of the moon.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
If a British government experienced such a long and persistent resistance to domestic policy in England, then that policy would almost certainly be changed... We have asserted that we are political prisoners, and everything about out country - our arrests, interrogations, trials, and prison conditions - show that we are politically motivated.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
We must see our present fight right through to the very end.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
Well, I have gotten by twenty-seven years, so that is something. I may die, but the Republic of 1916 will never die. Onward to the Republic and liberation of our people.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
The body doesn't accept the lack of food, and it suffers from the temptation of food and from other aspects which gnaw at it perpetually. The body fights back sure enough, but at the end of the day, everything returns to the primary consideration - that is, the mind.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
They have nothing in their entire arsenal to break the spirit of one single Republican prisoner-of-war who refuses to be broken,' I thought, and that was very true. They cannot or never will break our spirit.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
I was set to confront the might of the imperial empire with an M-1 carbine and enough hate to topple the world.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
I am dying not just to attempt to end the barbarity of H-blocks or to gain the rightful recognition of political prisoners, but primarily because what is lost here is lost for the Republic.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
There is that much to be done that no select or small portion of people can do; only the greater mass of the Irish nation will ensure the achievement of a Socialist Republic, and this can only be done by hard work and sacrifice.
  --  Bobby Sands
%
A virtuous character is likened to an unblemished flower. Piety is a fadeless bud that half opens on earth and expands through eternity. Sweetness of temper is the odor of fresh blooms, and the amaranth flowers of pure affection open but to bloom forever.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
The rose is the flower and handmaiden of love - the lily, her fair associate, is the emblem of beauty and purity.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I have had so much at heart. Defeated, not conquered; disappointed, not discouraged. I have but to be more energetic and more faithful in the difficult and painful vocation to which my life is devoted.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
The duties of a teacher are neither few nor small, but they elevate the mind and give energy to the character.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
They say, 'Nothing can be done here!' I reply, 'I know no such word in the vocabulary I adopt!'
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Jasmine, the name of which signifies fragrance, is the emblem of delicacy and elegance. It is reared with difficulty in New England, but at the South, puts forth all its graces.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Your minds may now be likened to a garden, which will, if neglected, yield only weeds and thistles; but, if cultivated, will produce the most beautiful flowers, and the most delicious fruits.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
With care and patience, people may accomplish things which, to an indolent person, would appear impossible.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Steady, firm, and kind government of prisoners is the truest humanity and the best exercise of duty. It is with convicts as with children: unseasonable indulgence, indiscreetly granted, leads to mischiefs which we may deplore but cannot repair.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I may be too craving of that rich gift, the power of sharing other minds. I have drunk deeply, long, and oh! how blissfully at this fountain in a foreign clime. Hearts met hearts, minds joined with minds; and what were the secondary trials of pain to the enfeebled, suffering body when daily was administered the soul's medicine and food!
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Men need knowledge in order to overpower their passions and master their prejudices.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I worship talents almost. I sinfully dare mourn that I possess them not.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
What an enthusiastic devotion is that which sends a man from the attractions of home, the ties of neighbourhood, the bonds of country, to range plains, valleys, hills, mountains, for a new flower.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
My happiest hours are spent in school, surrounded by those I hope to benefit.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Pleasures take to themselves wings and fly away; true knowledge remains forever.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I believe the best mode of aiding convicts is so to apportion their tasks in prison as to give to the industrious the opportunity of earning a sum for themselves by 'over-work.' A man usually values that most for which he has labored; he uses that most frugally which he has toiled hour by hour and day by day to acquire.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
We are not sent into this world mainly to enjoy the loveliness therein, nor to sit us down in passive ease; no, we were sent here for action. The soul that seeks to do the will of God with a pure heart, fervently, does not yield to the lethargy of ease.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Always remember those things that tend to strengthen and improve your understanding. You cannot learn without attention, neither retain those lessons that you have once learnt without frequently reflecting upon and reviewing them in your mind; by this means, things long past will remain impressed upon your memory.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
What child has ever known the country and has not twined hundreds of fragrant wreaths with the yellow shining cowslip and the more frail and delicate violet - mingling here and there green leaves culled from the odorous eglantine, or, as we more commonly call it, sweetbriar.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Those who do wrong very often think others are censuring them, when they are not even thought of.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
No blessing, no good, can follow in the path trodden by slavery.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
What greater bliss than to look back on days spent in usefulness, in doing good to those around us.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
My wish is to be known only thru my work.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character, and then he is never made radically better for its influence.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Why not, when it can be done without exposure or expense, let me rescue some of America's miserable children from vice and guilt?
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
The great benefactors of individuals and of communities are the enlightened educators: the wise-teaching, mental and moral instructors and exemplars of our times.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I have little taste for fashionable dissipations, cards, and dancing; the theatre and tea parties are my aversion, and I look with little envy on those who find their enjoyment in such transitory delights, if delights they may be called.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
In order to do good, a man must be good; and he will not be good except he have instruction by counsel and by example.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I shall try and effect all that is before me to perform; and God, I think, will surely give me strength for His work so long as He directs my line of duty.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
The lovely daisy, so justly celebrated by European poets, is not a native of our soil; we know it well, however, by cultivation in our gardens and green houses; besides, we are disposed to remember it for the sake of those who have sung its praises in immortal verse.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Of my English friends, I should find language too poor to speak the just praise and the excellence which shines in their characters and lives.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I was early taught by sorrow to shed tears, and now when sudden joy lights up, or any unexpected sorrow strikes my heart, I find it difficult to repress the full and swelling tide of feeling.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Happy are those who dwell apart from the harrowing tumults of public life!
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
By all means, have you give great attention to your arithmetic, as its advantages are so many and important.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I shall be well enough when I get to Kentucky or Alabama. The tonic I need is the tonic of opposition. That always sets me on my feet.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Know,' says a wise writer, the historian of kings, 'Know the men that are to be trusted'; but how is this to be? The possession of knowledge involves both time and opportunities. Neither of these are 'handservants at command.'
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
That statesman is indeed happy who can count as his friends the really honest and consistent, the true Patriots, and the men of honorable thought.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
There is, I think, great difficulty in writing of one's self: it is almost impossible to present subjects where the chief actor must be conspicuous and not seem to be, or really be, egotistical.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I must study alone, as I am condemned to do every thing alone, I believe, in this life.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I would be cautious in embracing or rejecting doctrines. Had they been essential to our salvation, they would have been more explicitly declared in the Gospels, where we are so well taught the practice of every good word and work.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
To me, the avocation of a teacher has something elevating and exciting. While surrounded by the young, one may always be doing good.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Nothing seems to me so likely to make people unhappy in themselves and at variance with others as the habit of killing time.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
As you have learnt something of time, value and make a proper use of it. Once past, it knows no return; how necessary, then, that you spend it in improving your mind and fitting it for future happiness and usefulness.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Think how slow would be your progress in learning without printed books: you could study only manuscripts, and those necessarily must be very few in number. Learn from this to value your books, and always handle them with care.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
It is of no use to commit whole pages to memory, merely to recite them once without hesitation; you must think of the meaning more than the words - of the ideas more than the language.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Time passed solely in the pursuit of pleasure leaves no solid enjoyment for the future; but from the hours you spend in reading and studying useful books, you will gather a golden harvest in future years.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
If we had only those things which are procured with ease and freedom from danger, we should find the comforts and luxuries, if not many of the necessaries of life, considerably diminished.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Attention to any subject will in a short time render it attractive, be it ever so disagreeable and tedious at first.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Indulged habits of dependence create habits of indolence, and indolence opens the portal to petty errors, to many degrading habits, and to vice and crime with their attendant train of miseries.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
The French, perhaps more than any other nation, cherish the memory of their dead by ornamenting their places of sepulture with the finest flowers, often renewing the garlands and replacing such plants as decay with vigorous and costly ones.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Floral emblems have been often adopted. The houses of York and Lancaster had their roses, the Bourbons of France, the fleur-de-lis, Scotland her thistle, and Ireland her shamrock.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
The capsules of the geranium furnish admirable barometers. Fasten the beard, when fully ripe, upon a stand, and it will twist itself or untwist, according as the air is moist or dry.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
The fabled origin of the laurel is this. Daphne, daughter of the river Peneus, offended by the persecutions of Apollo, implored succour of the gods, who changed her into a laurel tree. Apollo crowned his head with the leaves and ordered that forever after, the tree should be sacred to him.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
There is, in our nature, a disposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, which, unless hourly combated, will overcome and destroy the best faculties of our minds and paralyze our most useful powers.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
I am contracting continually a debt of gratitude which time will never see canceled. There is a treasury from which it will be repaid, but I do not dispense its stores.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
All my habits through life have been singularly removed from any condition of reliance on others, and the feeling - right or wrong - that aloneness is my proper position has prevailed since my early childhood, no doubt nourished and strengthened by many and quick-following bereavements.
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Life is not to be expended in vain regrets. No day, no hour, comes but brings in its train work to be performed for some useful end - the suffering to be comforted, the wandering led home, the sinner reclaimed. Oh! How can any fold the hands to rest and say to the spirit, 'Take thine ease, for all is well!'
  --  Dorothea Dix
%
Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The white man's victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation and murder.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The appeal to the white man's pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
I came home every Friday afternoon, riding the six miles on the back of a big mule. I spent Saturday and Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my country school on Sunday afternoon.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
In fact, for all kinds of offenses - and, for no offenses - from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the same.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The negro has suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the women of his race by white men than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The Afro-American is not a bestial race.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way... so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place. The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.
  --  Ida B. Wells
%
There is nothing of greater importance to the well-being of society at large - of man as well as woman - than the true proper position of woman.
  --  Lucretia Mott
%
Learning, while at school, that the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that, when they became teachers, women received only half as much as men for their services, the injustice of this distinction was so apparent.
  --  Lucretia Mott
%
Those who read the Scriptures and judge for themselves, not resting satisfied with the perverted application of the text, do not find the distinction that theology and ecclesiastical authorities have made in the condition of the sexes.
  --  Lucretia Mott
%
Let our lives be in accordance with our convictions of right, each striving to carry out our principles.
  --  Lucretia Mott
%
We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.
  --  Lucretia Mott
%
The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.
  --  Lucretia Mott
%
The laws given on Mount Sinai for the government of man and woman were equal; the precepts of Jesus make no distinction.
  --  Lucretia Mott
%
It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her.
  --  Lucretia Mott
%
My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.
  --  Mother Jones
%
I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don't need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!
  --  Mother Jones
%
Injustice boils in men's hearts as does steel in its cauldron, ready to pour forth, white hot, in the fullness of time.
  --  Mother Jones
%
Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit!
  --  Mother Jones
%
I believe that no man who holds a leader's position should ever accept favors from either side. He is then committed to show favors. A leader must stand alone.
  --  Mother Jones
%
Whatever your fight, don't be ladylike.
  --  Mother Jones
%
I preferred sewing to bossing little children.
  --  Mother Jones
%
I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please.
  --  Mother Jones
%
Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
  --  Mother Jones
%
If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class!
  --  Mother Jones
%
I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
  --  Mother Jones
%
The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.
  --  Mother Jones
%
I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.
  --  Mother Jones
%
My teachers treated me as a diamond in the rough, someone who needed smoothing.
  --  Mother Jones
%
That is, the wife must care for what the husband cares for if he is to remain resolute.
  --  Mother Jones
%
I had a vision - and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened - the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams - and I heard a voice saying, 'Such is your luck, such are you called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bear it.'
  --  Nat Turner
%
All my time not devoted to my master's service was spent either in prayer, or in making experiments in casting different things in moulds made of earth, in attempting to make paper, gunpowder, and many other experiments, that, although I could not perfect, yet convinced me of its practicability if I had the means.
  --  Nat Turner
%
Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.
  --  Nat Turner
%
Since the commencement of 1830, I had been living with Mr. Joseph Travis, who was to me a kind master and placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment of me.
  --  Nat Turner
%
After having supplied myself with provisions from Mr. Travis's, I scratched a hole under a pile of fence rails in a field, where I concealed myself for six weeks, never leaving my hiding place but for a few minutes in the dead of night to get water, which was very near.
  --  Nat Turner
%
I was not addicted to stealing in my youth, nor have ever been; yet such was the confidence of the Negroes in the neighborhood, even at this early period of my life, in my superior judgment, that they would often carry me with them when they were going on any roguery, to plan for them.
  --  Nat Turner
%
To a mind like mine, restless, inquisitive, and observant of everything that was passing, it is easy to suppose that religion was the subject to which it would be directed; and, although this subject principally occupied my thoughts, there was nothing that I saw or heard of to which my attention was not directed.
  --  Nat Turner
%
When I got large enough to go to work, while employed I was reflecting on many things that would present themselves to my imagination; and whenever an opportunity occurred of looking at a book, when the school-children were getting their lessons, I would find many things that the fertility of my own imagination had depicted to me before.
  --  Nat Turner
%
Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the social democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Though foreign loans are indispensable for the emancipation of the rising capitalist states, they are yet the surest ties by which the old capitalist states maintain their influence, exercise financial control, and exert pressure on the customs, foreign and commercial policy of the young capitalist states.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Democracy is indispensable, not because it renders superfluous the conquest of political power by the proletariat, but, on the contrary, because it makes this seizure of power both necessary and possible.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
One day, when the world market is more or less fully developed and can no longer be suddenly enlarged, and if labour productivity continues to advance, then sooner or later the periodic clashes between productive forces and market barriers will begin, and because of their recurrence, these will naturally become increasingly rough and stormy.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Only through the conscious action of the working masses in city and country can it be brought to life, only through the people's highest intellectual maturity and inexhaustible idealism can it be brought safely through all storms and find its way to port.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine-wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Under the leaden sway of Alexander III's government, the silence of the graveyard prevailed. Russian society, equally discouraged by the collapse of all hopes for peaceful reforms and by the apparent ineffectiveness of the revolutionary movement, was in the grip of a mood of depression and resignation.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Credit reproduces all the fundamental antagonisms of the capitalist world. It accentuates them. It precipitates their development and thus pushes the capitalist world forward to its own destruction.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
%
Social democracy... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
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The existing legal constitution is nothing but the product of a revolution. Revolution is the act of political creation in the history of classes, while constitutional legislation is the expression of the continual political vegetation of a society.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
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The very action of the proletariat is a determining factor in history. And although we can no more jump over the stages of historical development than a man can jump over his shadow, nevertheless, we can accelerate or retard that development.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
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Work for legal reform takes place only within the framework of the social form created by the last revolution.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
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In the Imperialist Era, the foreign loan played an outstanding part as a means for young capitalist countries to acquire independence.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
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People finally understood that the role of the social-democratic party rests on its conscious leadership of the mass struggle against the existing society, a struggle that must reckon with the vital, necessary conditions of capitalist society.
  --  Rosa Luxemburg
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First rule of change is controversy. You can't get away from it for the simple reason all issues are controversial. Change means movement, and movement means friction, and friction means heat, and heat means controversy.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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The first step in community organization is community disorganization.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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The Prince' was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. 'Rules for Radicals' is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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My only fixed truth is a belief in people: a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy.'
  --  Saul Alinsky
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All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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As an organizer, I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be - it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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To the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation... If you start with nothing, demand 100 percent, then compromise for 30 percent, you're 30 percent ahead.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in an orthodox Jewish community, I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Everybody owned stock in the Capone mob; in a way, he was a public benefactor. I remember one time when he arrived at his box seat in Dyche Stadium for a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day, and 8,000 scouts got up in the stands and screamed in cadence, 'Yea, yea, Big Al. Yea, yea, Big Al.'
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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History is a relay of revolutions.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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The Capone gang was actually a public utility; it supplied what the people wanted and demanded.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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If the ends don't justify the means, what does?
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Last guys don't finish nice.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing. In short, radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event, you are not even a failure. You're just not there.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.
  --  Saul Alinsky
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