“Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.”

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision. . . is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.

Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

there is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one’s whole being in the determination: this must change.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other – in balance with it… The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.

Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist – if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.

Gandhi once declared that it was his wife who unwittingly taught him the effectiveness of nonviolence. Who better than women should know that battles can be won without resort to physical strength? Who better than we should know all the power that resides in noncooperation?

A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.

It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.

Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

People may find it more comfortable to listen to us if we equivocate, but in the long run only words that discomfort them are going to change our situation.

The point is to change one’s life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point is so to act that one can master them now.

We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

Speculation in oil stock companies was another great evil … From the first, oil men had to contend with wild fluctuations in the price of oil. …

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green…

I also maintain that clear knowledge of natural science must be acquired, in the first instance, through mastery of medicine alone.

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.

If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.

There are two sides to this Baptism: The first is, you possess the Spirit; The second is that the Spirit possesses you.

Whoever wishes to investigate medicine should proceed thus: In the first place, consider the seasons of the year and what effect each of them produces.