Angela Davis quotes

Radical simply means "grasping things at the root." (Angela Davis)
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Angela Davis
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. View quote
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. View quote
Angela Davis
The prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards' unions, and legislative and court agendas. View quote
Angela Davis
In the aftermath of the war, we find one of the most hidden eras of US history; and that is the period of radical reconstruction. It certainly remains the most radical era in the entire history of the United States of America. And this is an era that is rarely acknowledged in historical texts. ... There were progressive laws passed challenging male supremacy. This is an era that is rarely acknowledged. During that era of course we had the creation of what we now call historically black colleges and universities and there was economic development. This period didn't last very long. From the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, we might take 1865 as that day until 1877 when a radical reconstruction was overturned-and not only was it overturned but it was erased from the historical record-and so in the 1960s we confronted issues that should have been resolved in the 1860s. One hundred years later. View quote
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. View quote
Angela Davis
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society. View quote
Angela Davis
We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death. (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. View quote
Angela Davis
To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Angela Davis
I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively. View quote
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. View quote
Angela Davis
First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons. View quote
Angela Davis
And I guess what I would say is that we can't think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can't necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation. View quote
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. View quote
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)
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. View quote
Angela Davis
That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated. View quote
Angela Davis
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. View quote
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. View quote
Angela Davis