Quotes & Sayings About Social Injustices

Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth
even if they decide to help the less fortunate
while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible. — Michael Eric Dyson

People never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which they live. — Suzanne La Follette

First, it is a commitment to particularism, to giving priority to the specificity of particulars, not to abstractions and generalities that divert our attention away from concrete realities. Idealizations tend to be partial and distorting, obscuring the heterogeneity and complexity of actual experiences and concrete practices, which is why they do not provide an adequate standpoint for the diagnosis of social problems and injustices. — Jose Medina

You're a crime fiction writer if...The injustices of this world boil your blood. You become a fucking supernova. So you write. — Verge Le Noir

Let's be honest. The activities of our economic and social system are killing the planet. Even if we confine ourselves merely to humans, these activities are causing an unprecedented privation, as hundreds of millions of people-and today more than yesterday, with probably more tomorrow-go their entire lives with never enough to eat. Yet curiously, none of this seems to stir us to significant action. And when someone does too stridently point out these obvious injustices, the response by the mass of the people seems so often to be ... a figurative if not physical blow to the gut, leading inevitably to a destruction of our common future. Witness the enthusiasm with which those native nations that resisted their conquest by our culture have been subdued, and the eagerness with which this same end is today brought to those-native or not-who continue to resist too strongly. How does this come to happen, in both personal and social ways? — Derrick Jensen

Feminism, in its fullest meaning, enjoins the human race to establish zones of liberation, and literally to reshape the territorial definition of our patriarchal world, along with the social identities and injustices that those boundaries have defined for all of us. — Leslie Weisman

We've never had our injustices rectified from the top, from the president or Congress, or the Supreme Court, no matter what we learned in junior high school about how we have three branches of government, and we have checks and balances, and what a lovely system. No. The changes, important changes that we've had in history, have not come from those three branches of government. They have reacted to social movements. — Howard Zinn

A lot of people think if they're shouting the loudest, they'll be heard, but most people lose respect for you when you lose your cool. You have to maintain everyone's respect, especially as a woman in a position of power. It's terrible to be at that kind of disadvantage, where if you yell, people will talk about you behind your back more than if you were a man. Because of those social injustices we face as women, you have to make sure that no one can call you a crazy bitch. — Taylor Swift

Christian hope frees us to act hopefully in the world. It enables us to act humbly and patiently, tackling visible injustices in the world around us without needing to be assured that our skill and our effort will somehow rid the world of injustice altogether. Christian hope, after all, does not need to see what it hopes for (Heb. 11:1); and neither does it require us to comprehend the end of history. Rather, it simply requires us to trust that even the most outwardly insignificant of faithful actions - the cup of cold water given to the child, the widow's mite offered at the temple, the act of hospitality shown to the stranger, none of which has any overall strategic socio-political significance so far as we can now see - will nevertheless be made to contribute in some significant way to the construction of God's kingdom by the action of God's creative and sovereign grace. — Craig M. Gay

Very important thing to keep in mind, that when justice comes and when injustices are remedied, they're not remedied by the initiative of the national government or the politicians. They only respond to the power of social movements. — Howard Zinn

Some people say that the West has a cruel history. These people also may see the achievements of Western countries - in terms of the economy, education, health, and social achievements - as a result of exploitation of poorer countries, including Arab countries. Western nations get rich by using resources such as Arab oil. Meanwhile, the countries supplying them raw materials remain poor. Due to such injustices, jealousies are created. — Dalai Lama

I remember a Buddhist teachers reflections on the Holocaust ... What terrible karma those Jews mustve had ... This kind of fundamentalism, which blames the victims and rationalizes their horrific fate, is something no longer to be tolerated quietly. It is time for ... modern Buddhism to outgrow it by accepting social responsibility and finding ways to address such injustices. — David Loy

We think of a feminist as someone a woman becomes in reaction to personal indignities and social injustices. But the truth is, such inequities only awaken her to the feminist she has always fundamentally been - that is, a person who understands that her first responsibility is to her own humanity. That's why, for my money, the first known use of the word 'feminist' is still the best, appearing in an 1895 book review: a woman who 'has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence. — Susan Faludi

The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic,and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression. — Gene Sharp

It's absolutely essential for every generation to capture that social responsibility. Injustice grows like weeds. The injustices of the world are like weeds, and if you do nothing they'll choke your whole garden, man. — Luis Valdez

So many good fortunes have come my way, and I'm trying to pay it forward by helping to raise money to complete 'Bulbul: Song Of The Nightingale,' a documentary that brings attention to the social and human injustices suffered by the Banchara tribe in India. — Ian Anthony Dale

[Christian rebellion] arises from the doctrine of mankind made in the image of God, and therefore protests against all forms of dehumanization. It sets itself against the social injustices which insult God the Creator, seeks to protect human beings from oppression and longs to liberate them ... it protests against every authoritarian regime, whether of the left or of the right, which discriminates against minorities, denies people their civil rights, forbids the free expression of opinions or imprisons people for their views alone. — John R.W. Stott

The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices. — John Fowles

Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation, not by confrontation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer. — Frank Herbert

the single ruling party remains in control while a wide range of conversations about the country's problems nonetheless occurs on websites and social-networking services. The government follows this online chatter, and sometimes people are able to use the Internet to call attention to social problems or injustices and even manage to have an impact on government policies. As a result, the average person with Internet or mobile access has a much greater sense of freedom - and may feel that he has the ability to speak and be heard - in ways that were not possible under classic authoritarianism. — Larry Diamond

Present injustices exist not so much because simple individuals are acting in bad faith or lacking in charity, but because huge, impersonal systems (that seem beyond the control of the individuals acting within them) disprivilege some even as they unduly privilege others. — Ronald Rolheiser

I think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it's our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity. — Terry Tempest Williams

He held her, and rocked her slightly side to side, soothing her as she'd seen him calm their children after innumerable physical injuries and social injustices. — Lisa Genova

Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices. — Simon Callow

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me. — Sue Monk Kidd

Let us give practical recognition to the injustices of the past,by building a future based on equality&social justice — Nelson Mandela

Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future ... A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices, a revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future ... It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have - creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility. — Grace Lee Boggs

'Savage Inequalities' was about school finance, and 'Amazing Grace' primarily dealt with medical and social injustices in New York. But with 'Ordinary Resurrections,' I had no predetermined agenda. When I met with the children, I was not in pursuit of any line of thinking. In our conversations, I let them lead me where they wanted to go. — Jonathan Kozol