“Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group.”

When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

The only weapons that make me dangerous are my mind, mouth and pride, which will surely educate you.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

The campaign against the death penalty has been – while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

History always seems to repeat itself.

Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals.

Discrimination based on skin color, sexual orientation,& gender needs to stop. We’re all humans at the end of the day.

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender.

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it’s perhaps far more terrible than it’s ever been.

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.

Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.

Woman’s discontent increases in exact proportion to her development.

Only as a child’s awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development.

Inherent to socialism is the absence of choice. If I want to choose my own pretzels or books or iphones, they prevent me – they fine me, or imprison me. And those systems, not infrequently have historically, have developed into systems where there are programs.

Our task is not to penetrate the essence of things, the meaning of which we do not know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature

I feel really grateful to the people who encouraged me and helped me develop. Nobody can succeed on their own.

A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.

One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows.