Angela Davis

And I guess what I would say is that we can't think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can't necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.

When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.

That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.

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.

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.

Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­ selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.

It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals

There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

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.

Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.

What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.

We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.