Quotes on Social Justice

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.

The trouble is that not enough people have come together with the firm determination to live the things which they say they believe.

Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.

It isn't those who are taken by force, put in chains, and sold as slaves who are the real slaves; it is those who will accept it, morally and physically.

All token Blacks have the same experience. I have been pointed at as a solution to things that have not yet begun to be solved, because pointing at us token Blacks eases consciences of millions, and this is dreadfully wrong.

In a society where the rights and potential of women are constrained, no man can be truly free. He may have power, but he will not have freedom.