Quotes by Civil Rights Activists - Page 3

I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people.
Rosa Parks
The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors – in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy! It is a miracle that the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man’s heaven! The miracle is that the white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders’, his preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees, and others who have been allowed to wax fat off their black poor brothers, have been able to hold the black masses quiet until now.
Malcolm X
Never ask a woman about other men.Either she'll tell you a lie, and you still won't know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.
Malcolm X
Laura never again came to the drugstore as long as I continued to work there.The next time I saw her, she was a wreck of a woman, notorious around black Roxbury, in and out of jail. She had finished high school, but by then she was already going the wrong way.Defying her grandmother, she had started going out late and drinking liquor.This led to dope, and that to selling herself to men. Learning to hate the men who bought her, she also became a Lesbian. One of the shames I have carried for years is that I blame myself for all of this.To have treated her as I did for a white woman made the blow doubly heavy.The only excuse I can offer is that like so many of my black brothers today, I was just deaf, dumb, and blind.
Malcolm X
[We're] going to change the world. One day they'll write about us. You'll see.
Viola Gregg Liuzzo
Gospel music is nothing but singing of good tidings -- spreading the good news. It will last as long as any music because it is sung straight from the human heart.
Mahalia Jackson
At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.
A. Philip Randolph
You are either free or not free
Malcolm X
... the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.
Malcolm X
I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin...
Malcolm X
We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.
Malcolm X
Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.
Malcolm X
Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.
Malcolm X
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
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
This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely.
Malcolm X
In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life.
James Weldon Johnson
An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.
Malcolm X
I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.
Malcolm X
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
Malcolm X
Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.
Malcolm X
It has hindered where it might have helped; it has been evasive when it was morally bound to be forthright; it has separated believers on the basis of color, although it has declared its mission to be a universal brotherhood under Jesus Christ. Christian love is the white man's love for himself and for his race.
Malcolm X
Recuerdo que algún día yo le hablé de mi río y una como tormenta se agitó en sus estrañas. No sé si fue mi pecho que tembló de recuerdo o si fueron mis ojos que asomaron nostalgias." "I remember a day when I spoke of my river and something like a storm stirred in his being. Was it my breast that trembled with the memory Was it nostalgia that showed through my eyes
Julia de Burgos
Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción
Julia de Burgos
I am planting a tree in this bomb crater to remind us that in the midst of death, there is life... and hope.
Robert S. Graetz
I'm through with you. Yes, I am going to put you down. From now on, I am my own God. I am going to live by the rules I se for myself. I'll discard everything I was once taught about you. Then I'll be you. I'll be my own God, living my life as I see fit. Not as Mr. Charlie says I should live it, or Mama or anybody else. I shall do as I want in this society that apparently wasn't meant for me and my kind. If you are getting angry because I am talking to you like this, then just kill me, leave me here in this graveyard dead. Maybe thats where all of us belong anyway. Maybe then we wouldn't have to suffer so much. At the rate we are being killed now, we'll all be soon dead anyway.
Anne Moody
This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America
Paul Robeson
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.
Malcolm X
I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda… I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
Malcolm X
Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.
Malcolm X
The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.
Malcolm X
Truth is on the side of the oppressed.
Malcolm X
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
Malcolm X
The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too.
Malcolm X
You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker
Malcolm X
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
So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.
Malcolm X
People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.
Malcolm X