…Quotes Still More

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”—Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”

“Those who trust in their riches will fall,
but the righteous will thrive like a green leaf.”—Proverb 11:28

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress…Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”—Fredrick Douglass

“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.”—Abbie Hoffman

“Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”—Howard Zinn

“Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights.
All the wealth you make is taken, by exploiting parasites.
Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave?
Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave?”—Joe Hil

“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”—Jane Addams

“Learn to do good;
Seek justice,
Rebuke the oppressor;
Defend the fatherless,
Plead for the widow.”—Isaiah 1:17

“Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation.”—bell hooks

“We need to see men and women as equal partners.”—Betty Friedan

“What is a labor victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to achieve a temporary gain and not a lasting victory.”—Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

“Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.”—Susan B. Anthony

“In the new version of the law of supply and demand, jobs are so cheap — as measured by the pay — that a worker is encouraged to take on as many of them as she possibly can.”—Barbara Ehrenreich

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”—James Baldwin

“The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.”—Oscar Wilde

“Each person must live their life as a model for others.”—Rosa Parks

“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.

“He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise.”—Luke 3:11

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity. Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free.”—Abbie Hoffman

“Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.”—1 John 3:7–18

“Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down.”—Archbishop Oscar Romero

“People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.”—Shane Claiborne

“…it is only the property of the rich that is secure; the man who lives by the sweat of his brow has no asylum from oppression.”—Mary Wollstonecraft

“Unencumbered capitalism is not a substitute for social policy; that on its own, without a social compact, raw capitalism is destined to serve the few at the expense of the many”—David Simons

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”—Franklin Roosevelt

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. “—Nelson Mandela

“Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise”—Thomas Jefferson

“I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that ‘Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.’”—Susan B. Anthony

“No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”—Barbara Ehrenreich

“…we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Capitalism is organised crime, and we are all its victims.”—The Refused

“Whenever immoral laws are in place, a moral obligation exists to be illegal.”—Miguel de la Torre

“While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”—Eugene V. Debs

“The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.”—Friedrich Engels

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register…

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

“I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.”—James Baldwin