Quotes About Political Activism

#1. As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination.

Pankaj Mishra

#2. For me, writing, drawing, and political activism are three separate pursuits; each has its own intensity. I happen to be especially attuned to and engaged with the society in which I live. Both my writing and my drawing are invariably mixed up with politics, whether I want them to be or not.

Gunter Grass

#3. Stonewall" has come to mark the origins of gay political activism although earlier groups in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the French movement that grew out of the May 1968 events cannot be ignored.

Chantal Zabus

#4. I'm struggling to keep up with her pace. Though I'm taller, she's built for speed and I'm built for political activism.

Jani Berghuis

#5. What is music in America? It's this stand-in for political action in a lot of senses. We have no democracy and we have no art culture, and we've long considered politics nebbish-y and hopelessly unsexy. So a lot of what would be considered political activism is channeled into cultural work.

Ian Svenonius

#6. The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people.

Cornel West

#7. That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.

June Jordan

#8. Musicians always want to sacrifice our creativity to get involved in environmental issues or political activism of some sort - to reduce it to something more populist in terms of sing-alongs or guitar songs with a message.

Eyvind Kang

#9. Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self.

Tom Robbins

#10. Our aims in political activism are not, and should not be, to create a perfect utopia.

Paul Wellstone

#11. When it comes to engaging and influencing culture, too many Christians think too highly of political activism.

Tullian Tchividjian

#12. Hitler spoke at length about the impact of his own personal Catholic faith on his political activism, noting that it was his religious convictions in particular that compelled him to be a ruthless anti-Semite.

Derek Hastings

#13. A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged.

Rebecca Solnit

#14. I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll.

Patti Smith

#15. If CASA?s board, which includes such scientific experts as actress Jamie Lee Curtis, wants to tell the world that drinking is bad for you, that?s their prerogative? But there?s no excuse for political activism masquerading as science.

Bill Vaughan

#16. I've embraced rock 'n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock 'n' roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately.

Patti Smith

#17. My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

Camille Paglia

#18. Whenever anybody gets involved in politics, its always exciting for me because we take for granted our freedoms and our abilities to effect change through political activism.

Emily Saliers

#19. To me, a political song is also a personal song. Most political activism has been driven by empathy for other people and the desire for a world that's less divisive. Even if songs aren't overtly political, they can make a listener more empathetic.

Conor Oberst

#20. Take your hurt feelings and channel them into political activism.

Joy Browne

#21. Non-violence is not a passive idea. It is ethical activism at its political best

Ela Bhatt

#22. Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistle-blowing, of activism, of political journalism.

Glenn Greenwald

#23. The more fear confrontational activism can put into the heart of the political class, the better.

Glenn Greenwald

#24. We cannot afford to be discouraged from challenging the corporate control of our food system, our genetic commons, our shared resources, or our democracy. The history of social change in our nation shows that the political system can be reformed, even if the road is long and zigzag.

Wenonah Hauter

#25. There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

Audre Lorde

#26. Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.

Larry Kramer

#27. Examples of goodness that know no ethnic, religious, racial, or political bounds are important documents of war, as they also represent an axis around which a healthy future can be constructed after the atrocities have halted.

Dario Spini

#28. In college I studied '60s and '70s radicalism, student activism, forms of political violence, groups like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the New Left.

Marisha Pessl

#29. If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.

Thomas Sowell

#30. I have no interest in eliminating the tension between justice and forgiveness by taking justice off the table. Given the subtleties of sin and the persistence of evil, we would soon be living in moral anarchy and political chaos if there were no provision for justice.

Eugene H. Peterson

#31. In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace.

Camille Paglia

#32. There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.

Camille Paglia

#33. All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.

Seyla Benhabib

#34. Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

Terry Eagleton

#35. For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.

B.R. Ambedkar

#36. There is no politically neutral fence available for us to sit on, and our attempts to do so have the consequence (intended or not) of supporting the existing political system.

Anne Kearney

#37. They were dealt with as in war, and they naturally employed the means that were used against them.

Leo Tolstoy

#38. Judicial activism, by definition, is a term applied to judges who render decisions with which you disagree.

James W. Mercer

#39. The enemy is not individuals, churches, 'ex-gay' organisations or political parties; the enemy is ignorance. Change is created by focusing our energies on overcoming the latter instead of attacking the former.

Anthony Venn-Brown

#40. Use the KEY to change: Knowledge Empowers You!

Andrew Kreig

#41. 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