Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that t….

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems..

One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation ….

As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the Nation….

As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the Nationa….

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians..

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?.

I don't know whether the movement crashed as a result of the overwhelming character of the institutions we set out to change. I think repression had ….

I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way..

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they ari….

I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected in….

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….

I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy..

We are never assured of justice without a fight..

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

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively..

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general..

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..

Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are….

we have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance..

We don’t go further than what Marx called the exchange value of the actual object - we don’t think about the relations that that object embodies - an….