Top 85 Angela Davis Quotes
#1. In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
Angela Davis
#2. Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.
Angela Davis
#3. Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was - 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within - internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.
Angela Davis
#4. Often young black people are looking towards the alternative economies. They are looking towards the drug economy ... the economies that are going to that apparently will produce some kind of material gain for them.
Angela Davis
#5. When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.
Angela Davis
#6. We cannot assume that people by virtue of the fact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressive political struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies that assume that black unity black political unity is possible.
Angela Davis
#7. I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital.
Angela Davis
#8. We have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance.
Angela Davis
#9. It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals
Angela Davis
#10. I'm a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.
Angela Davis
#11. We must always attempt to lift as we climb
Angela Davis
#12. Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.
Angela Davis
#13. Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.
Angela Davis
#14. It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.
Angela Davis
#15. I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.
Angela Davis
#16. I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.
Angela Davis
#17. 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
#19. First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.
Angela Davis
#20. I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.
Angela Davis
#21. I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.
Angela Davis
#22. The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.
Angela Davis
#23. I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.
Angela Davis
#24. I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.
Angela Davis
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement.
Angela Davis
#28. Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.
Angela Davis
#29. Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.
Angela Davis
#30. I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.
Angela Davis
#31. Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
Angela Davis
#32. 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
#33. Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.
Angela Davis
#34. We have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism.
Angela Davis
#35. Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings ...
Angela Davis
#36. 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
#37. That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.
Angela Davis
#38. You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right now.
Angela Davis
#39. I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world,
Angela Davis
#40. We can't talk about the black community. It's no longer a homogeneous community; it was never a homogeneous community.
Angela Davis
#41. I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.
Angela Davis
#42. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
Angela Davis
#43. Racism cannot be separated from capitalism.
Angela Davis
#44. As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.
Angela Davis
#45. Kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.
Angela Davis
#46. Obviously there are some organizations that go out on the street and say we want an end to the capitalist system. But obviously that is not going to happen as a result of just assuming that stance.
Angela Davis
#47. Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.
Angela Davis
#48. I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way.
Angela Davis
#49. We are never assured of justice without a fight.
Angela Davis
#50. I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.
Angela Davis
#51. The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.
Angela Davis
#52. I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing.
Angela Davis
#54. Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.
Angela Davis
#55. We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.
Angela Davis
#56. What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
Angela Davis
#57. As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.
Angela Davis
#58. To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.
Angela Davis
#59. As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.
Angela Davis
#60. Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.
Angela Davis
#61. I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.
Angela Davis
#62. Progressive art can assist people to learn what's at work in the society in which they live.
Angela Davis
#63. We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Angela Davis
#64. Well I teach in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So that's my primary work. I lecture on various campuses and in various communities across the country and other parts of the world.
Angela Davis
#65. No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step.
Angela Davis
#66. We wear the global sweat of women and girls on our bodies" - Angela Davis, lecture at UC Davis, Sponsored by the Women's Resources and Research Center
Angela Davis
#67. Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.
Angela Davis
#68. And I guess what I would say is that we can't think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can't necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.
Angela Davis
#69. Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery - did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.
Angela Davis
#70. Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.
Angela Davis
#71. Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.
Angela Davis
#72. 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
#73. I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change ... I'm changing the things I cannot accept.
Angela Davis
#74. What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.
Angela Davis
#75. 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
#76. Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.
Angela Davis
#77. My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.
Angela Davis
#78. Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.
Angela Davis
#79. In this society, dominated as it is by the profit-seeking ventures of monopoly corporations, health has been callously transformed into a commodity - a commodity that those with means are able to afford, but that is too often entirely beyond the reach of others.
Angela Davis
#80. I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.
Angela Davis
#81. You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.
Angela Davis
#82. I'm thinking about some developments say in the 80s when the anti-apartheid movement began to claim more support and strength within the US. Black trade unionists played a really important role in developing this US anti-apartheid movement.
Angela Davis
#83. It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it's not going to solve the problems.
Angela Davis
#84. A fair trial would have been no trial at all.
Angela Davis
#85. But at the same time you can't assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.
Angela Davis
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
