Angela Davis Quotes

When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who's asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa. ~ 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. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

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

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. ~ Angela Davis

I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us. ~ 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. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

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

When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

But at the same time you can't ... ~ Angela Davis

I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers. ~ Angela Davis

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. ~ Angela Davis

The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that. ~ Angela Davis

Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages. ~ 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. ~ 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. ~ 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. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

She does her hair in an Afro like Cicely Tyson, that famous actress I seen on TV once, or Angela Davis, who I don't know exactly who she is but they say she's got guts and ain't scared of white people. ~ James McBride

You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right now. ~ 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. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do. ~ Angela Davis

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

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. ~ Angela Davis

We wear the global sweat of women and girls on our bodies" - Angela Davis, lecture at UC Davis, Sponsored by the Women's Resources and Research Center ~ Angela Davis

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. ~ Angela Davis

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings ... ~ Angela Davis

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

But at the same time you can't assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life. ~ Angela Davis

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve consciousness of capitalism (I mean the feminism that I relate to, and there are multiple feminisms, right). So it has to involve a consciousness of capitalism and racism and colonialism and post-colonialities, and ability and more genders than we can even imagine and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name. ~ Angela Davis

Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis: open, relentless, and on time! She is as radiant, she is as true, as that invincible sunrise she means means means to advance With all of the faith and all of the grace of her entirely devoted life. ~ June Jordan

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. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

Black women have been cultured to compare not connect. ~ Michaela 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. ~ Angela Davis

I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

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

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. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

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

Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it's not going to solve the problems. ~ Angela Davis

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons. ~ Angela Davis

Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television - in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. ~ James Baldwin

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. ~ 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. ~ 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. ~ Angela Davis

Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society. ~ Angela Davis

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. ~ Angela Davis

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 iPads 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. ~ Angela Davis

A fair trial would have been no trial at all. ~ Angela Davis

Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. ~ James Baldwin

You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently. ~ Angela Davis

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

What is invaluable about Angela Davis' work is that she does not limit her politics to issues removed from broader social considerations, but connects every aspect of her scholarship and public interventions to what the contours of a truly democratic society might look like. ~ Henry Giroux

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

We are never assured of justice without a fight. ~ Angela Davis

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

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer. ~ Angela Davis

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

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

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. ~ Angela Davis

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival. ~ Angela Davis

My idea of philosophy is that if it is not relevant to human problems, if it does not tell us how we can go about eradicating some of the misery in this world, then it is not worth the name of philosophy. I think Socrates made a very profound statement when he asserted that the raison d'etre of philosophy is to teach us proper living. In this day and age 'proper living' means liberation from the urgent problems of poverty, economic necessity and indoctrination, mental oppression. ~ Angela Davis

How I grew to believe Black hair has power, genius, and magic in it, defying gravity and limitation. I mean, look at how marvelous it is: Black hair grows up and out. ~ Michaela Angela Davis

Defining oneself is a revolutionary act, and, as described in her memoir, Janet Mock fiercely fought to free herself with exquisite bravery and sensitivity. Redefining Realness is full of hope, dreams, and determination. It is a true American girl story. ~ Michaela Angela Davis

Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement. ~ Angela Davis

We have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism. ~ Angela Davis

There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. 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. ~ Angela Davis

I want to see all oppressed people throughout the world free. And the only way we can do this is by moving toward a revolutionary society where the needs and wishes of all people can be respected.' With these words the radical philosophy professor Angela Davis paraphrases Isaiah's ancient messianic dream of the lion that will peacefully lie down with the lamb in a completely good world. But what the Biblical prophet perhaps could not know is contained with a clarity that leaves nothing to be desired in the opening sentence of an address of the French Senate to Napoleon I: Sire, the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can affect the human mind. ~ Paul Watzlawick

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. ~ Angela Davis

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

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

I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change ... I'm changing the things I cannot accept. ~ Angela Davis

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

I think that nothing teaches you more about life than death and dying. ~ Patti Davis

But things such as 'Harry Potter', all I can do is shape my character, seek the director's approval on that, and basically take it from there. Professor Flitwick in 'Harry Potter', I kind of defined how I saw him from reading the book, and luckily that matched up with the director's vision. ~ Warwick Davis

No boy ever makes you special. You just are. Understand? ~ Heather Davis

I'm way too disorganized. ~ Hope Davis

Happy endings aren't for cowards. I've been alive for how many years, and I've just found that one out. I learned to be unfaithful from my parents. Not infidelity in the classic sense- but I was always prepared for the unhappy ending, which made me less willing to word toward a happy one. I was unfaithful to the idea of a well-adjusted future. ~ Jill Davis

But I think her feelings about our mother were a heavy burden in her life, at least when they were together. When our mother was far away, maybe she could forget her. Our mother was always stepping on her to get up higher, always needing to be right, always needing to be better than her, and than all of us, most of the time. The terrible innocence of our mother, too, as she did that. She had no idea, most of the time. ~ Lydia Davis

I'm used to being coached. Something I learned long ago is that a coach is trying to make you better and to be the best version of yourself. ~ Meryl Davis

The old vacuum cleaner keeps dying on her
over and over
until at last the cleaning woman
scares it by yelling:
"Motherfucker! ~ Lydia Davis

I love you. I trust you and... I want to be your human canvas! ~ Angela Gascoigne