Quotes
Political & inspirational quotes by bell hooks, Audre Lourde, Erich Fromm, Angela Davis, Huey Newton
“We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.”
Angela Davis
“It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.”
Angela Davis
“There’s a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory.”
Angela Davis
“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
Angela Davis
“Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.”
Huey P. Newton
“There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.”
bell hooks
“It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.”
bell hooks
“If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
bell hooks
“The man who accepts Western values absolutely, finds his creative faculties becoming so warped and stunted that he is almost completely dependent on external satisfactions; and the moment he becomes frustrated in his search for these, he begins to develop neurotic symptoms, to feel that life is not worth living, and, in chronic cases, to take his own life.”
Paul Robeson
“Everyone has an urge to create. Its expression may flow through many channels: through writing, art or music, through the inventiveness of work or in any number of ways unique to all of us, whether it be cooking, gardening or the art of social discourse. The point is to honour the urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits.”
Gabor Maté
“We are poor indeed if we are only sane.”
D.W. Winnicott
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
Carl Jung
“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.”
Erich Fromm
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it… Life is not what one lived, but rather what one remembers, and how it is remembered to tell the tale.”
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
“Humanity can learn from those who have broken their chains. Those who have chained humanity for centuries cannot teach humanity anything.”
Fidel Castro
“If you walk through life and don’t help anybody, you haven’t had much of a life.”
Fred Hampton
“The task is to transform society; only the people can do that – not heroes, not celebrities, not stars.”
Huey P Newton
“You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.”
Terence McKenna
“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.”
bell hooks
“Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!”
Paul Goodman
“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
D W Winnicott
“Quality of life lies in knowledge, in culture. Values are what constitute true quality of life, the supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter and clothing.”
Fidel Castro
“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.”
Lao Tzu
“If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core — the fountain — of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.”
Audre Lorde
“The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”
Terence McKenna
“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.”
bell hooks