Best 69 quotes of Angela Davis on MyQuotes

Angela Davis

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Actually we've had a black bourgeoisie or the makings of a black bourgeoisie for many more decades.In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the US has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    A fair trial would have been no trial at all.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­ selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I can't really blame a lot of young sisters and brothers who believe that education has anything to offer them. Because as a matter of fact, it has nothing to offer them. Suppose they do get a high school diploma that is meaningful. What kind of job is awaiting them. The jobs that used to be available to working class people are not there as a result of the de-industrialization of this economy.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I don't know whether the movement crashed as a result of the overwhelming character of the institutions we set out to change. I think repression had a lot to do with the dismantling of the movement and also the winning of certain victories had something to do with the inability of the movement to take those victories as the launching point for new goals and developing new strategies.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I don't think it's necessary to feel guilty. Because I know that I'm still doing the work that is going to help more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system, and I'm trying to use whatever knowledge I was able to acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move us forward.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

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

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I'm thinking about some developments say in the 80s when the anti-apartheid movement began to claim more support and strength within the US. Black trade unionists played a really important role in developing this US anti-apartheid movement.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    It doesn't surprise me that aspect of the black nationalist movement, the cultural side, has triumphed because that is the aspect of the movement that was most commodifiable and when we look at the commodification of blackness we're looking at a phenomenon that's very profitable and it's connection with the rise of a black middle class I think is very obvious.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

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

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I think it's important for us to recognize that although historically black communities have been very progressive with respect to issues of race and with respect to struggles for racial equality, that does not necessarily translate into progressive positions on gender issues, progressive positions on issues of sexuality and in the latter 1990s we have to recognize the intersectionality, the interconnectedness of all of these institutions and attitudes.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I think it’s the right moment to talk about it because it is part of a revolutionary perspective - how can we not only discover more compassionate relations with human beings but how can we develop compassionate relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet and that would mean challenging the whole capitalist industrial form of food production.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities. The door is opened only so far. If some of us can squeeze through the crack of that door, then we owe it to those who have made those demands that the door be opened to use the knowledge or the skills that we acquire not only for ourselves but in the service of the community as well. This is something that I guess I decided a long time ago.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I think we need to insist on a certain responsibility, which people have - particularly those who have made it into the ranks of the middle class because as [ Martin Luther] King said many years ago in a sense they have climbed out of the masses on the shoulders of their sisters and brothers and therefore, they do have some responsibility.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

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

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor--because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them ... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Not only the brothers on the street but the middle class brothers are also identifying with the gangster rappers because of the extent to which this music circulates. It becomes possible for the - not only the young middle class men, but it becomes possible for young middle class white men and young men of other racial communities to identify with the misogyny of gangster rap.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Obviously there are some organizations that go out on the street and say we want an end to the capitalist system. But obviously that is not going to happen as a result of just assuming that stance.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Often young black people are looking towards the alternative economies. They are looking towards the drug economy.... the economies that are going to that apparently will produce some kind of material gain for them.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was - 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within - internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

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

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Angela Davis

    Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.