Quotes on Justice

Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.

True freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.

We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as free humans in this society.

When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

The freer that women become, the freer men will be. Because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and color and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

They wonder much to hear that gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value than it is.

It's one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it's another not to be able to live by what one does know.

Men have no special right because they belong to one race or another: the word man defines all rights.

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.

There never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.

I am for lifting everyone off the social bottom. In fact, I am for doing away with the social bottom altogether.

It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

All I was trying to do was get home from work.

Democracy cannot be static. Whatever is static is dead.

Any woman who has a great deal to offer the world is in trouble. And if she's a black woman, seh's in deep trouble.

We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.

Where Slavery is, there Liberty cannot be; and where Liberty is, there Slavery cannot be.

The intolerance of the few, or the risk of it, carries the day against the wider humanity of the many.