Madalyn Murray O'Hair Quotes

I often tell people I don't care whether they join the NAACP or some other group, but you better join something.

North Carolina is an amazing place. It has the best food, and also has folks fighting really hard for what's right.

Negro intellectuals have come to realize that they must carry on the fight, in concert with others, to make America true to her own ideals of equality and democracy.

I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.

Before I went to college, I went to the S.N.C.C. office three times a week to offer my services and catch up on my 'Liberator' magazine. The other two days, I went to the Lycee Francais to keep my French crisp. I felt comfortable in the diversity of my worlds.

We're criminalizing economic inability to stay out of the system. Women get penalized more than men for the same crime; blacks get penalized more than whites for the same crime. We need to bring out more into the light, because it's not fair... I applaud Colin Kaepernick for speaking out.

It's very important that people who are feeling the need to do something... get activated.

I want to act, if I can, as a bridge for people who read 'Shock Doctrine' or 'No Logo'. People who are sitting out for whatever reasons.

I'm very involved in church and social-justice issues, and my personality is far more introspective.

You can't be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters and not feel like you've got some kind of social responsibility.

It's about being a voice in the community. There's so many ways to be a voice, and that's what I'm figuring out.

Regardless of how much media coverage will be received, talking and raising awareness about social injustice isn't enough.

I was very engaged in my communities throughout college, but I never thought of it as political.

I think that many of the issues they were facing in South Africa were the same as those I was singing about. Conscription, resisting the draft, government repression - I mentioned all those things in my songs.

Get involved in your neighborhood. That's how I got really, really committed to the immigrant rights movement.

It's about cultural forums and movements and collectives of people taking a stand. That's all activism is.

In my real life, I'm a Black Lives Matter social justice activist, and so it was incredibly interesting to me to play somebody coming from the totally opposite side, whose beliefs are as deeply entrenched - as deeply felt, and given as much gravity, as I give my beliefs.

Be an active participant in your community and country. Every small gesture makes up the big gestures. Resist, rinse, repeat.

The consciousness-raising, the advocacy, the passion, the youth of your movement is so critical.

My music is made for the people who are willing to stand up to change this world themselves.

If some black man go out and start something, a riot or something or, I'm not going to jump in it and get killed because he's gone out and started something I don't believe in what he's fighting for or his approach.

Be prepared to organize nonviolent workshops - a teach-in around what is happening in America today. Organize your teachers and schoolmates, and be prepared to engage in some action.

I think our duty as American citizens is to be involved and engaged in anything that affects us. As an artist, I have to use my platform, and as a dad, a brother, and a black man, I have to be as socially woke and present as possible.

Part of the reason I had such a drive to be an activist, and support other activists, is because I was raised Quaker and my parents kept us very much informed and involved as kids in civil rights and the conservation movement.

The only way you really see change is by helping to create it.