I think we need to insist on a certain responsibility, which people have - particularly those who have made it into the ranks of the middle class because as [ Martin Luther] King said many years ago in a sense they have climbed out of the masses on the shoulders of their sisters and brothers and therefore, they do have some responsibility.

Angela Davis

Categorized in : Kings Responsibility Brother

I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.

Angela Davis

women-leadership accepting

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

Angela Davis

ifs world

Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society.

Angela Davis

white-man winning men

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve consciousness of capitalism (I mean the feminism that I relate to, and there are multiple feminisms, right). So it has to involve a consciousness of capitalism and racism and colonialism and post-colonialities, and ability and more genders than we can even imagine and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.

Angela Davis

racism names mean

We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.

Angela Davis

amnesia forgetfulness depends

When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

Angela Davis

discipline children school

Walls turned sideways are bridges.

Angela Davis

wall bridges leadership

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

addiction drug views

Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.

Angela Davis

civil-rights rights justice

When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.

Angela Davis

mean country ideas

We must always attempt to lift as we climb

Angela Davis

lifts climbs

I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.

Angela Davis

elude-us long believe

There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.

Angela Davis

police-violence ku-klux-klan justice

I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

Angela Davis

historical giving thinking

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?

Angela Davis

political mean ideas

The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.

Angela Davis

mind country thinking

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

Angela Davis

african-american mind inspiring

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

Angela Davis

diversity hard-times justice

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

Angela Davis

empowerment process class

We are never assured of justice without a fight.

Angela Davis

assured fighting justice