Civil Rights Activist Quotes & Sayings

Rosa Parks' entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist. — Douglas Brinkley

I have a big passion about civil rights for everyone - whoever is being downtrodden at the moment, it doesn't matter: racial discrimination or sexual orientation or gender. Whatever it is, I'm there. I think I was a born civil rights activist. I can't stand the smashing of a community. It's not fair and it's not right. — Pauley Perrette

Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it. — Dick Gregory

Only until all human beings begin to recognize themselves as human beings will prejudice be gone forever. People ask me what race I am, but there is no such thing as race. I just answer: "I'm a member of the human race. — Amelia Boynton Robinson

It is from the unseen world that the phenomenal world emerges, and it is from the unseen realm of our hearts that all actions spring. The well-known civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. said that in order for people to condemn injustice, they must go through four stages. The first stage is that people must ascertain that indeed injustices are being perpetrated. In his case, it was injustices against African Americans in the United States. The second stage is to negotiate, that is, approach the oppressor and demand justice. If the oppressor refuses, King said that the third stage is self-purification, which starts with the question: "Are we ourselves wrongdoers? Are we ourselves oppressors?" The fourth stage, then, is to take action after true self-examination, after removing one's own wrongs before demanding justice from others. — Hamza Yusuf

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university. — Russell Banks

We start 'The Butler' in June and that's incredibly exciting for me because I get to work with the amazing Forest Whitaker again. It's a phenomenal script and a great, great role - I play his son. Oprah Winfrey is his wife and my mother. My character is a radical civil rights activist. — David Oyelowo

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932) — Andrew Young

Gospel music is nothing but singing of good tidings -- spreading the good news. It will last as long as any music because it is sung straight from the human heart. — Mahalia Jackson

When a journalist pressed Werner for a clear answer on the "Is Earth f**ked" question, he set the jargon aside and replied, "More or less."4 There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner described it as "resistance" - movements of "people or groups of people" who "adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture." According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes "environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups." Such mass uprisings of people - along the lines of the abolition movement and the civil rights movement - represent the likeliest source of "friction" to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. — Naomi Klein

As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices. — Isaac Hayes

My life is about being a civil rights activist. That's my life. Whoever you are, everyone, we either have civil rights or we don't. It's for everyone. — Pauley Perrette

I don't like calling myself a "feminist" only because I don't think I've done anything active enough to call myself one. It'd be like calling myself a civil rights activist just because I'm not racist. — Bo Burnham

I don't call myself a white supremacist. I'm a civil rights activist concerned about European-American rights. — David Duke

I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice. — Anne Lamott

Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger. — Michael N. Castle