“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” - Elie Wiesel
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” - Colin Powell
“To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed.” - Sidney Poitier
“You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker.” - Malcolm X
“The next time a woman of whatever color, or a dark-skinned person of whatever sex aspires to be president, the way should be a little smoother because I helped pave it.” - Shirley Chisholm
“You don’t miss the water ‘til the well runs dry.” - Fred Hampton
“I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.” - Harriet Tubman
“Show me a population that is deeply religious, and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, contumely and the gibbet, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction.” - Hubert Harrison
“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” - James Baldwin
“Be unwavering and relentless in your approach.” - Halle Berry
“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” - Nelson Mandela
“The soul that is within me no man can degrade.” - Frederick Douglass
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say that you enjoyed it.” - Zora Neale Hurston
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” - James Baldwin
“It isn’t where you came from; it’s where you’re going that counts.” - Ella Fitzgerald
“In every truth, the beneficiaries of a system cannot be expected to destroy it.” - A. Philip Randolph
“My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.” - Robert Smalls
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” - Desmond Tutu
“No one will do for you what you need to do for yourself. We cannot afford to be separate. We have to see that all of us are in the same boat.” - Dorothy Height
“The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.” Monesquieu
“My being a black woman is not a deficit. It is a strength. Because I could not be where I am had I not overcome so many other barriers. Which means you know I'm relentless, you know I'm persistent, and you know I'm smart.” - Stacey Abrams
“Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We're going to have to struggle. We're going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we're asking for peace, they are a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers, and they don't even understand what peace means.” - Fred Hampton
“We must always do that. We can’t afford to let it go because the moment we let it go, it’s going to cover us up, so we must keep going. I didn’t fight all those years ago in Stonewall just to turn around and let it go now. That was 50 years ago. So, we’ve got to keep fighting no matter what.” - Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass
“I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.” - Audre Lorde
“We say that we will work with anybody and form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind.” - Fred Hampton
“We demand that segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963! We demand that we have effective civil rights legislation - no compromise, no filibuster - and that include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC and the right to vote.” - Bayard Rustin
“Darling, I want my gay rights now.” - Marsha P. Johnson
“Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.” - Kwame Nkrumah
“None of us is responsible for the complexion of his skin. This fact of nature offers no clue to the character or quality of the person underneath.” - Marian Anderson
“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.” - James Baldwin
“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” - Audre Lorde
“The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement, and they want it to feed your shame.” - Viola Davis
“Dreams are lovely but they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral, pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.” - Shonda Rhimes
“A nation is formed by the willingness of each of us to share in the responsibility for upholding the common good.” - Barbara Jordan
“People are tired of being kept from the dignity that allows them to make their own choices.” - Condoleezza Rice
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” - Frederick Douglass
“Justice is never given; it is exacted.” - A. Philip Randolph
“The path to your success is not as fixed and inflexible as you think.” - Misty Copeland
“Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.” - Elie Wiesel
“The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” - Audre Lorde
“If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it.” - Sojourner Truth
“Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.” - Carol Moseley-Braun
“I wish I could shut up, but I can't, and I won't.” - Desmond Tutu
“I am passionate about everything in my life - first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.” - Bell Hooks
“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.” - Frederick Douglass
“Truth is powerful and it prevails.” - Sojourner Truth
“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 death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” - Robert M. Hutchins
“Racism separates, but it never liberates. Hatred generates fear, and fear once given a foothold binds, consumes, and imprisons. Nothing is gained from prejudice. No one benefits from racism.” - Thurgood Marshall
“I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.” - Nelson Mandela
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” - Frederick Douglass
“I’m not going to continue knocking that old door that doesn’t open for me. I’m going to create my own door and walk through that.” - Ava DuVernay
“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.” - James Baldwin
“There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.” - Michelle Obama
“We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.” - Barack Obama
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.” -Abraham Lincoln
“We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much.” - Sojourner Truth
“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
“You can cage the singer, not the song.” - Harry Belafonte
“History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.” - Marsha P. Johnson
“The rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.” - Sojourner Truth
“If you don’t have a lens that’s been trained to look at how various forms of discrimination come together, you’re unlikely to develop a set of policies that will be as inclusive as they need to be.” - Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” - Robin Williams
“When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” - Bayard Rustin
“The time is always right to do what is right.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I have an inner satisfaction of having done what I thought was right at the time which I thought was right.” - A. Philip Randolph
“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” - Muhammad Ali
“I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to a part of an ongoing historical movement.” - Angela Davis
“Never be afraid to sit a while and think.” - Lorraine Hansberry
“The first need of a free people is to define their own terms.” - Stokely Carmichael
“You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” - Malcolm X
“What the people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise.” - Barbara Jordan
“There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement. Three people are better than no people.” - Fannie Lou Hamer
“You are where you are today because you stand on somebody’s shoulders. And wherever you are heading, you cannot get there by yourself. If you stand on the shoulders of others, you have a reciprocal responsibility to live your life so that others may stand on your shoulders. It’s the quid pro quo of life. We exist temporarily through what we take, but we live forever through what we give.” - Vernon Jordan
“I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.” - Bayard Rustin
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” - Elie Wiesel
“A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.” - Malcolm X
“Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight with us; principle has. Loyalty is meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to.” - A. Philip Randolph
“Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.” - Maya Angelou
“I had no idea that history was being made. I was just tired of giving up.” - Rosa Parks
“Diversity is not about how we differ. Diversity is about embracing one another’s uniqueness.” - Ola Joseph
”I am lucky that whatever fear I have inside me, my desire to win is always stronger.” - Serena Williams
“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!” - Audrey Hepburn
“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.” - Arthur Ashe
“I need to see my own beauty and to continue to be reminded that I am enough, that I am worthy of love without effort, that I am beautiful, that the texture of my hair and that the shape of my curves, the size of my lips, the color of my skin, and the feelings that I have are all worthy and okay.” - Tracee Ellis Ross
“Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.” - William Lloyd Garrison
“It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.” - Audre Lorde
“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.” - Maya Angelou
“I’m not persuaded that the opposite of poverty is wealth - I’ve come to believe…that the opposite of poverty is justice.” - Bryan Stevenson
“What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?” - Toni Morrison
“There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.” - Lorraine Hansberry
“Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.” - John Lewis
“One thing is clear to me: We, as human beings, must be willing to accept people who are different from ourselves.” - Barbara Jordan
“Stand for something or you will fall for anything. Today’s mighty oak is yesterday’s nut that held its ground.” - Rosa Parks
“Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.” - Oprah Winfrey
“You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people. You can’t save the people if you don’t serve the people.” - Cornel West
“I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.” - Malcolm X
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” - Angela Y. Davis
“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” - Frederick Douglass
“Even if it makes others uncomfortable, I will love who I am.” - Janelle Monáe
“Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it.” - Marian Anderson
“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” - Frederick Douglass
“When we ignore the will of the people, people lose.” - Lori Lightfoot
“I'm opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.” - Kamala Harris
“My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” - Malcolm X
“Now I've been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave.” - Harriet Tubman
“In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” - Booker T. Washington
“Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.” - Elie Wiesel
“How many years has it taken people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race? I mean how many years does it take people to see that? We're all in this rat race together!” - Marsha P. Johnson
“We have to start learning, and you learn through practice. We have to start making mistakes, and you learn through making mistakes.” - Fred Hampton
“The valuation of profit over people impedes human rights across much of the world.” - Opal Tometi
“You can never know where you are going unless you know where you have been.” - Amelia Boynton Robinson
“The majority of the Negroes who took part in the year-long boycott of Montgomery's buses were poor and untutored; but they understood the essence of the Montgomery movement; one elderly woman summed it up for the rest. When asked after several weeks of walking whether she was tired, she answered: ‘My feet is tired, but my soul is at rest.’” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.” - E. M. Forster
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” - Colin Powell
“Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism.” - Claude McKay
“I can't die but once.” - Harriet Tubman
“What are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality, discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights.” - B. R. Ambedkar
“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” - Shirley Chisholm
“The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic but to end the injustice.” - Paul Robeson
“Don’t tell me it’s the worst ever seen - that is an insult to the slaves, to Holocaust survivors, to the women who marched for voting rights, to the LGBT community.” - Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
“Make sure you’re very courageous: be strong, be extremely kind, and above all be humble.” - Serena Williams
“We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.” - Maya Angelou
“You have to understand that people have to pay a price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win.” - Fred Hampton
“The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.” - James Baldwin
“But at the same time you can't assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.” - Angela Davis
“It always seems impossible until it's done.” - Nelson Mandela
“I will not take ‘but’ for an answer.” - Langston Hughes
“The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.” - Maya Angelou
“My greatest beauty secret is being happy with myself. I don’t use special creams or treatments - I’ll use a little bit of everything. It’s a mistake to think you are what you put on yourself. I believe that a lot of how you look is to do with how you feel about yourself and your life. Happiness is the greatest beauty secret.” - Tina Turner
“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.” - James Baldwin
“I truly believe that the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” - Viola Davis
“History has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own.” - Michelle Obama
“You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.” - Medgar Evers
African American Minister and Human Rights Activist “The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward.” - Ijoema Oluo
“Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman.” - Marian Anderson
“Activism is my rent for living on the planet.” - Alice Walker
“I know we have to have people of good conscience who stand up against oppression. I know we have to have people who understand that social justice belongs to us all. And that wakes me up every morning, and that makes me fight even harder.” - Stacey Abrams
“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” - Desmond Tutu
“In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.” - Audre Lorde
“Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.” - Elie Wiesel
“There's no prerequisites to worthiness. You're born worthy, and I think that's a message a lot of women need to hear.” - Viola Davis
“Racism is intricately linked with capitalism and I think it’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place.” - Angela Davis
“In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.” - Angela Davis
“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.” W.E.B Du Bois
“Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We’re going to have to struggle. We’re going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we’re asking for peace, they are a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers, and they don’t even understand what peace means.” - Fred Hampton
“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
“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.” - Audre Lorde
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” - Desmond Tutu
“A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.” - Colin Powell
“The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.” - Henry Louis Gates
“To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.” - Nelson Mandela
“You have to cherish things in a different way when you know the clock is ticking, you are under pressure.” - Chadwick Boseman
“There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” - Audre Lorde
“We will all, at some point, encounter hurdles to gaining access and entry, moving up and conquering self-doubt; but on the other side is the capacity to own opportunity and tell our own story.” - Stacey Abrams
“Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.” - Shirley Chisholm
“Let's stand together, stick together, and work together for justice of every description. Racial justice. Gender justice. Immigrant justice. Economic justice. Environmental justice.” - Lori Lightfoot
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” - James Baldwin
“For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” - Nelson Mandela
“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.” - Maya Angelou
“Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.” - Abraham Joshua Heschel
“I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community.” - Janet Mock
“If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.” - Maya Angelou
“There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow to make the make the first move - and he, in turn, waits for you.” - Marian Anderson
“Every successful social movement in this country’s history has used disruption as a strategy to fight for social change. Whether it was the Boston Tea Party to the sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South, no change has been won without disruptive action.” - Alicia Garza
“We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.” - Dorothy Height
“When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.” - George Washington Carver
“Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.” - Nelson Mandela
“Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
“If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything... that smacks of discrimination or slander.” - Mary McLeod Bethune
“I can't look into the crystal ball. All I can do is the here and now.” - Lori Lightfoot
“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” - Cornel West
“It’s important for us to also understand that the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' simply refers to the notion that there’s a specific vulnerability for African Americans that needs to be addressed. It’s not meant to suggest that other lives don’t matter. It’s to suggest that other folks aren’t experiencing this particular vulnerability.” - Barack Obama
“You can't legislate good will - that comes through education.” - Malcolm X
“Like we always said, if you’re asked to make a commitment at the age of twenty and you say I don’t want to make that commitment only because of the simple reason that I’m too young to die, I wanna live a little bit longer- what you did is, you’re dead already.” - Fred Hampton
“I was born in a bourgeois community and had some of the better things in life, but I found that there were more people starving than there were people eating, more people that didn’t have clothes than did have clothes, and I just happened to be one of the few. So I decided that I wouldn’t stop doing what I’m doing until all those people are free.” - Fred Hampton
“When I liberate myself, I liberate others. If you don’t speak out ain’t nobody going to speak out for you.” - Fannie Lou Hamer
“Everybody knows something, and no one knows everything.” - Dusty Baker
“I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” - Frederick Douglass
“I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against.” - Malcolm X
“I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.” - Michael Jordan
“Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow men” - B.R. Ambedkar
“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” - Audre Lorde
“The marginalized did not create identity politics: their identities have been forced on them by dominant groups, and politics is the most effective method of revolt.” - Stacey Abrams
“The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.” - Karl Marx
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” - Jackie Robinson
“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.” - Elie Wiesel
“Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life.” - B.R. Ambedkar
“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
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” - Audre Lorde
“Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.” - Coretta Scott King
“Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn’t cut it.” - James Earl Jones
“Our ability to participate in government, to elect our leaders and to improve our lives is contingent upon our ability to access the ballot. We know in our heart of hearts that voting is a sacred right - the fount from which all other rights flow.” - Stacey Abrams
“History has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own.” - Michelle Obama
“Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.” - Cornel West
“Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.” - A. Philip Randolph
“We will all, at some point, encounter hurdles to gaining access and entry, moving up and conquering self-doubt; but on the other side is the capacity to own opportunity and tell our own story.”- Stacey Abrams
“As of today, if I am asked abroad if I am a free citizen of the United States of America, I must only say what is true: No.” - Lorraine Hansberry
“A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men - and people in general.” - Lorraine Hansberry
“Everything would be alright if everything was put back in the hands of the people, and we're going to have to put it back in the hands of the people.” - Fred Hampton
“The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.” - Frederick Douglass
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” - Maya Angelou
“When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what out ‘colorblind’ society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure - the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the gate.” - Michelle Alexander
“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
“In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.”- Thurgood Marshall
“When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” - Audre Lorde
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” - Muhammad Ali
“You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution.” - Fred Hampton
“Stumbling is not falling.” - Malcolm X
“Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.” - Lorraine Hansberry
“I sleep when the sleep comes down on me.” - Claudette Colvin
“Negroes must be free in order to be equal, and they must be equal in order to be free... Men cannot win freedom unless they win equality. They cannot win equality unless they win freedom.” - A. Philip Randolph
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.”- Muhammad Ali
“They talked us into buying candy bars and throwing the candy away and eating the wrapper.” - Fred Hampton
“Nothing will work unless you do.” - Maya Angelou
“What excites me is just taking some time to breathe in life. The mundane is very exciting.” - Viola Davis
“If I fall, I'll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I'm not backing off.” - Fannie Lou Hamer
“Why don’t you live for the people? Why don’t you struggle for the people? Why don’t you die for the people?” - Fred Hampton
“You don’t have to be anything but yourself to be worthy.” - Tarana Burke
“My whole life i've been fighting, trying to improve conditions for black people. that's what i will continue to do, even if they never stand up for me.” - Andrea Jenkins
“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” - Nelson Mandela
“The man who never makes a mistake always takes orders from one who does. No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.” - Daisy Bates
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” - Maya Angelou
“When you've been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.” - Claudette Colvin
“Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks. “ - James Baldwin
“We all have different narratives; all of our narratives are at different stages of development.” - Viola Davis
“Strong people don't need strong leaders.” - Ella Baker
“I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.” - Madam C.J. Walker
“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” - Malcolm X
“We’re gonna have to do more than talk. We’re gonna have to do more than listen. We’re gonna have to do more than learn. We’re gonna have to start practicing and that’s very hard. We’re gonna have to start getting out there with the people and that’s difficult. Sometimes we think we’re better than the people so it’s gonna take a lot of hard work.” - Fred Hampton
“While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated.” - Maya Angelou
“Hold on to your dreams of a better life and stay committed to striving to realize it.” - Earl G. Graves, Sr.
“Nobody's free until everybody's free.” - Fannie Lou Hamer
“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.” - W.E.B. Du Bois
“There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.” - Nelson Mandela
“Take a stand for what’s right. Raise a ruckus and make a change. You may not always be popular, but you’ll be part of something larger and bigger and greater than yourself. Besides, making history is extremely cool.” - Samuel Jackson
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” - James Baldwin
“I knew then and I know now, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it.” - Claudette Colvin
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” - Ida B. Wells
“Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul that one can no longer tolerate when one is pushed against a wall.” - Cornel West
“Black history isn't a separate history. This is all of our history, this is American history, and we need to understand that. It has such an impact on kids and their values and how they view black people.” - Karyn Parsons
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” - Alice Walker
“You’ve got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion: a thermometer just reflects it.” - Cornel West
“A democracy cannot thrive where power remains unchecked and justice is reserved for a select few. Ignoring these cries and failing to respond to this movement is simply not an option - for peace cannot exist where justice is not served.” - John Lewis
“I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough - and I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.” - Lorraine Hansberry
“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
“The best way to make dreams come true is to wake up.” - Mae C. Jemison
“I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war.” - Bayard Rustin
“I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.” - Malcolm X
“We're too often told that our mistakes are ours alone, but victory is a shared benefit.” - Stacey Abrams
“The why of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the how is what must command the living.” - Lorraine Hansberry
“In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.” - Thurgood Marshall
“The movement for black lives isn’t just about black people. Black liberation has never just been about black people. It’s been about a fight for our humanity, for our dignity.” - Patrisse Cullors
“The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.” Maya Angelou
“Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.” - Desmond Tutu
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” - Nelson Mandela
“I'd like my grandchildren to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.” - Claudette Colvin
“There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” - Nelson Mandela
“We all require and want respect, man or woman, black or white. It’s our basic human right.” - Aretha Franklin
“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
“When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.” - Nelson Mandela
“When young people grow up with fear as the norm, they don't have the luxury to dream.” - Lori Lightfoot
“Don’t relax in the fact that someone else is going to do it and you’re going to be safe, no matter what it is.” - Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
“We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.” - Nelson Mandela
“Your silence will not protect you.” - Audre Lorde
“You have to be able to accept failure to get better.” - Lebron James
“In order to establish peace, you must have fair justice for everyone.” - Al Sharpton
“We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.” - Angela Davis
“I learned early on about the real meaning of equity and inclusion, and that when those guiding principles are not met, they can have devastating effects on individuals, families, and communities.” - Lori Lightfoot
“When we’re talking about diversity, it’s not a box to check. It is a reality that should be deeply felt and held and valued by all of us.” - Ava DuVernay
“A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.” - A. Philip Randolph
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” - Nelson Mandela
“Our visions begin with our desires.” - Audre Lorde
“Let woman’s claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken.” - Anna Julia Cooper
“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” - Desmond Tutu
“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\
“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
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope... and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” - Robert F. Kennedy
“People have the right to protest - that's what democracy is all about. I have no problem with people exercising their democratic rights.” - Condoleezza Rice
“There can be neither geographical nor racial lines where Democracy is concerned. It is for all or for none.” - Cyril Briggs
“Don't agonize, organize.” - Florynce Kennedy
“Each and every one of us has the capacity to be an oppressor. I want to encourage each and everyone of us to interrogate how we might be an oppressor and how we might be able to become liberators for ourselves and for each other.” - Laverne Cox
“Where there is no vision, there is no hope.” - George Washington Carver
“I have long since passed that period when I felt personal discomfort at the sight of an ill-dressed or illiterate Negro. Social awareness has taught me where to lay the blame.” - Lorraine Hansberry
“I don't have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I'm as good as anybody, but no better.” - Katherine Johnson
“Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise. I rise. I rise.” - Maya Angelou
“My mother had a saying: 'Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last.'“ Kamala Harris
“I learned a long time ago the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me.” - Maya Angelou
“If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life.” - Marcus Garvey
“Community isn't something I ever take for granted.” - Lori Lightfoot
“I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.” - Harriet Tubman
“Winning is not always the barometer of getting better.” - Tiger Woods
“Freedom is never given; it is won.” - A. Philip Randolph, civil rights activist
“Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.” - Frederick Douglass
“We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.” - Desmond Tutu
“Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.” - Angela Davis
“As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.” - Marian Anderson
“We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.” - Barack Obama
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” - James Baldwin
“I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.” - Desmond Tutu
“You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.” - Shirley Chisholm
“I write to understand as much as to be understood.” - Elie Wiesel
“If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.” - Maya Angelou
“Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.” - Colin Powell
“In a perfect dream, things would be set exactly the way you would want them. But I think it’s more interesting that in real life, things aren’t exactly the way you planned.” - Naomi Osaka
“I’m not quite sure what freedom is, but I know damn well what it ain’t. How have we gotten so silly, I wonder.” - Assata Shakur
“The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” - Toni Morrison
“Believe you can and you're halfway there.” - Elie Wiesel
“A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” - Malcolm X
“A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.” - Barack Obama
“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.” - Martin Luther King Jr
“People have to be armed to have power, you see.” - Fred Hampton
“The Greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members” - Coretta Scott King
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” - Barack Obama
“Life has two rules: Number 1, never quit! Number 2, always remember rule number 1.”- Duke Ellington
“If Everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.” - Beyoncé Knowles
“As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.” - Angela Davis
“Keep going and keep speaking up, even if your voice shakes.” - Allyson Felix
“I always tell young people to hold on to their dreams. And sometimes you have to stand up for what you think is right even if you have to stand alone.” - Claudette Colvin
“What's important for my daughter to know is that... if you are fortunate to have opportunity, it is your duty to make sure other people have those opportunities as well.” - Kamala Harris
Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don't the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don't accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there's no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'“ - Claudette Colvin
“Whenever people ask me: 'Why didn't you get up when the bus driver asked you?' I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth's hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail.” - Claudette Colvin
“I also believe that you are what you have to defend, and if you’re a Black man, that’s always going to be the bar against which you are judged, whether you want to align yourself with those themes or not. You can think of yourself as a colorless person, but nobody else is gonna.” - Don Cheadle
“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” - Harriet Tubman
“Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part.” - John Lewis
“Unless man is committed to the belief that all mankind are his brothers, then he labors in vain and hypocritically in the vineyards of equality.” - Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
“Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.” - Jackie Robinson
“I may be crazy, but that don't make me wrong.” - Marsha P. Johnson
“Hold on to your dreams of a better life and stay committed to striving to realize it.” - Earl G. Graves, Sr.
“You really can change the world if you care enough.” - Marian Wright Edelman
“Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.” - Audre Lorde
“You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights.” - Marsha P. Johnson
“Failure is a part of success. There is no such thing as a bed of roses all your life. But failure will never stand in the way of success if you learn from it.” - Hank Aaron
“Friendly reminder that you don't have to say the 'n word' to be racist. That's not the sole requirement. Asking people to prove racism is another tool the oppressor uses to marginalize and discredit us.” - Lizzo
“Character is power.” - Booker T. Washington
“You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.” - Desmond Tutu
“We're going to fight racism not with racism, but we're going to fight with solidarity. We say we're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism.” - Fred Hampton
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” - James Baldwin
“If you can conceive it, and believe it, you can achieve it.”- Andrea Jenkins
“You borrow from the greats, and you make your own path without losing the core of who you are.” - Michael B. Jordan
“Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.” - Wilma Rudolph
“The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” - Malcolm X
“The only thing that separates women of color from everyone else is opportunity.” - Viola Davis
“Make no mistake about it: Change is hard, but change is necessary.” - Lori Lightfoot
“We must use words to uplift and include. We can use our words to fight back against oppression and hate. But we must also channel our words into action.” - Stacey Abrams
“We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.” - Carter Woodson
“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” - Toni Morrison
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” - Arthur Ashe
“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” - James Baldwin
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”- Langston Hughes
“I grew up like a neglected weed - ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.” - Harriet Tubman
“What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country wil have to upset this apple cart. We can no longer ignore the fact that America is not the... land of the free and the home of the brave.” - Fannie Lou Hamer
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” - Frederick Douglass
“We may not all be equally guilty. But we are all equally responsible for building a decent and just society.” - Ruby Bridges
“Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.” - James Baldwin
“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” - Fannie Lou Hamer
“Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.” - Dr. Mae Jemison
“I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.” - Frederick Douglass
“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” - Colin Powell
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” - Audre Lorde
“I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.” - June Jordan
“There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.” - Sojourner Truth
“You must be bold, brave, and courageous and find a way… to get in the way.” - John Lewis
“You can’t let fear paralyze you. The worse that can happen is you fail, but guess what: You get up and try again. Feel that pain, get over it, get up, dust yourself off and keep it moving.” - Queen Latifah
“I swear to the Lord I still can’t see why democracy means everybody but me.” - Langston Hughes
