Oscar Romero Quotes

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.

There never was a social change in America without angry people at the heart.

And the spirit of revolution will not die while the hearts of these workers continue to beat.

Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.

We happen to be the vanguard of that revolutionary struggle because we are the most dispossessed.

Dissidents can't be dissidents forever; we are dissidents because we don't want to be dissidents.

History dictates that unresponsive governments force ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.

No! I stand by the man who works. To hell with kings!

A movement that doesn't produce a backlash isn't much of a movement at all.

Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I'm still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.

The fight against racism must be seen as a revolutionary one.

I'm a communist, man. I'm going to break the rules.

The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.

it is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks.

Civil disobedience is the only nonviolent escape from the soul-destroying heat of violence.

My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out.

The powerful don't make revolutions

Sometimes you must live in a violent world in order to get greater justice.

Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle....goa ts are used for sacrificial offerings and not lions.

You don't have a revolution in which you love your enemy, and you don't have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.

I am a revolutionary; my life is dedicated to freeing the people.

Our history in this country dates from the moment that restless men among us became restless under oppression and rose against it . . . Agitation, contentions, ceaseless unrest, constant aspiring -- a race so moved must prevail.

It's a misconception to believe that the resistance ended with the civil rights movement.

Young people are capable, when aroused, of bringing down the towers of oppression and raising the banners of freedom.