Quotes on Social Justice

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude.

No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.

Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction.

People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.

It is a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man's.

America must begin the struggle for democracy at home. The advocacy of free elections in Europe by American officials is hypocrisy when free elections are not held in great sections of America.

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.

Grown men may learn from very little children, for the hearts of little children are pure, and, therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.

Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school — its isolation from life.

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done...in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done!

We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.