Activists & Leaders

“Radical simply means grasping things at the root.”

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”

“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read.”

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause.”

“O mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge !”

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

“You are never too small to make a difference.”

“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”

“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.”

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”

“We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected.”

“I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”

“Ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?”

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

“It's the little things citizens do. That's what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees.”