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

In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing.

You can’t criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.

No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step.

Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

Progressive art can assist people to learn what’s at work in the society in which they live.

Radical simply means “grasping things at the root.

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

It’s my body and I have the right to do whatever I want to do with it. So does every other female on this planet.

I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past.

It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.

We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia

If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.

We are never assured of justice without a fight.

Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes – and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.

A life lived without forgiveness is a prison.

It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains.

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion

The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable; and let it come! I repeat, Sir, let it come!

The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.

Dare to do things worthy of imprisonment if you mean to be of consequence.