Audre Lorde Quotes

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

Each one of our ideas should benefit the people with less power than us.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

A commitment to sexual equality with males... is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted.

In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.

I'm a straight white man - I have options, and I'm not blocked on a consistent basis when I wake up in the morning because of my race, sex, and orientation.

None of us live single-issue lives... That is why intersectionality is a strength, not a weakness.

Only a straight white person would have no concept of what visibility is. They've never contended with anything but visibility.

The leftist vision of politics as a matter of rights begets an attitude of grievance and entitlement.

Intersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them.

Visibility doesn't always equal freedom.

I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Social justice is a cancer. Social justice means you are ruled by whatever the mob does. What social justice does is destroy individual responsibility.

There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

If not now, then when? If not you, then who? If we are able to answer these fundamental questions, then perhaps we can wipe away the blot of human slavery.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.

For millions of women and men around the world, the playwright Eve Ensler is a beloved figure. She represents the epitome of the politically engaged artist, someone who uses her creative brilliance to illuminate injustice and give voice to the voiceless.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

No change can come if those who are impacted the most by discrimination are not willing to stand up for themselves.