June Jordan Quotes

Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.

You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.

Has any anti-war demonstration ever stopped a war?

The absolute key issue is: how do you create enough political pressure? It's up to us to create that political will and there are tried and tested techniques for doing that. So we're talking about the need for civil disobedience that escalates into a rebellion and uprising.

One of the tensions in XR are people who want to slow down and be strategic and then people who think it's an emergency, let's get out on the street now. There have been conflicts and disagreements.

[A.J. Muste] was very influenced - in - influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.

There is a vast need for all types of protest today, whether it be civil disobedience, or whether it be on a - more conventional variety.

any peace movement must have behind it a higher passion than the desire for war.

The purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the 'sense of utter irresponsibility' shown by the demonstrators.

I was a militant.

There's no problem on the planet that can't be solved without violence. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement.

We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.

King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.

I didn't do the marching down the streets, jumping in front of the lines and holding hands... that wasn't me.

When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.

Yet what you need is not marches, demonstrations, rallies or wide associations, all of them are important. What you need is direct action. The sooner people understand that, the sooner we'll begin to change things.

Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common: They are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause.

My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement. My father was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker; my mother was a secretary with the Panthers.

There are quite a few disgruntled Greenpeacers who are opposed to its policy of non-cooperation.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

Once you follow a path of nonviolence and social justice, it won't take you long before you come into conflict with the culture, with the society. You can't know what is at stake or how much it is going to cost you until you get in the game.

A dozen or more heroes dashing up two flights of stairs, prepared to stake their lives for their country, only to discover the two dangerous disturbers and trouble-makers, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, in their separate offices, quietly at work at their desks, wielding not a sword, nor a gun or a bomb, but merely their pens!

Government doesn’t always work the way its supposed to. Sometimes you have to use brute force, bring people together …