Best 69 quotes of Angela Davis on MyQuotes

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.

The de industrialization of the US. economy based on the migration of corporations into third world areas where labor is very cheap and thus more profitable for these companies creates on the one hand conditions in those countries that encourage people to emigrate to the US. in search of a better life. On the other hand, it creates conditions here that send more black people into the alternative economies, the drug economies, women into economies in sexual services, and sends them into the prison industrial complex.

The early feminist argument that violence against women is not inherently a private matter, but has been privatized by the sexist structures of the state, the economy, and the family has had a powerful impact on public consciousness.

The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex challenges to the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its presence that they could not con­ceive of society without it. Within the history of the United States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind.

There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.

We cannot assume that people by virtue of the fact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressive political struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies that assume that black unity black political unity is possible.

We can't talk about the black community. It's no longer a homogeneous community; it was never a homogeneous community.

We don’t go further than what Marx called the exchange value of the actual object - we don’t think about the relations that that object embodies - and were important to the production of that object whether it’s our food or our clothes or our I-pads or all the materials we use to acquire an education at an institution like this. That would really be revolutionary to develop a habit of imagining the human relations and non human relations behind all of the objects that constitute our environment.

we have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance.

We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.

We have to look at for example the increasing globalization of capital, the whole system of transitional capitalism now which has had an impact on black populations - that has for example eradicated large numbers of jobs that black people traditionally have been able to count upon and created communities where the tax base is lost now as a result of corporations moving to the third world in order to discover cheap labor.

Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery - did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.

Well I teach in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So that's my primary work. I lecture on various campuses and in various communities across the country and other parts of the world.

Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.

Cela faisait mal de voir que nous nous retournions contre nous-mêmes, que nous nous flagellions parce que nous ne savions pas encore comment lutter contre la course réelle de notre misère.

Un Algérien vivant à Paris en 1962 était un être traqé. Tandis que les Algériens se battaient contre l'armée française dans leurs montagnes et ds les villes européanisées d'Alger et d'Oran, des groupes terroristes paramilitaires tombaient sans discrimination sur les hommes et les femmes dans la capitale colonialiste, pour la simple raison qu'ils étaient ou paraissaient être algériens. A Paris, des bombes explosaient dans les cafés fréquentés par les Nord-Africains, des corps ensanglantés étaient découverts dans les rues sombres et des graffiti anti-algériens défiguraient les murs des immeubles et des stations de métro. Un après-midi, je me rendis à une manifestation qui avait lieu sur la place de la Sorbonne en faveur du peuple algérien. Quand les flics la dispersèrent à coups de lances d'incendie à haute pression, ils se montrèrent aussi vicieux que les flicsau cou rouge de Birmimgham qui avaient reçu les Marcheurs de la Paix avec des chiens et des lances d'incendie." p.144