"The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb."
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Quote collection
Angela Davis quotes (page 2 of 6)
112 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We are never assured of justice without a fight."
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"It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement."
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"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."
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"What this country needs is more unemployed politicians."
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"If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night."
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"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."
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"My idea of philosophy is that if it is not relevant to human problems, if it does not tell us how we can go about eradicating some of the misery in this world, then it is not worth the name of philosophy. I think Socrates made a very profound statement when he asserted that the raison d'etre of philosophy is to teach us proper living. In this day and age 'proper living' means liberation from the urgent problems of poverty, economic necessity and indoctrination, mental oppression."
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"Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been."
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"To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women."
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"Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings."
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"We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death."
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"It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo."
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"I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities. The door is opened only so far. If some of us can squeeze through the crack of that door, then we owe it to those who have made those demands that the door be opened to use the knowledge or the skills that we acquire not only for ourselves but in the service of the community as well. This is something that I guess I decided a long time ago."
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"Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'"
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"We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was."
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"We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers."
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"It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals"
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"I think it's important for us to recognize that although historically black communities have been very progressive with respect to issues of race and with respect to struggles for racial equality, that does not necessarily translate into progressive positions on gender issues, progressive positions on issues of sexuality and in the latter 1990s we have to recognize the intersectionality, the interconnectedness of all of these institutions and attitudes."
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"Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work."
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