Kate Millett Quotes

Life is now a war zone, and as such, the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially, and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.

There are all kinds of under-represented groups in the literary establishment.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

Waiting is the great vocation of the dispossessed.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

Unless you've been touched personally, it's difficult to see, but there are millions of people who have no voice whatsoever.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

I swear to the Lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me.

For the first time in the life of the great republic, there was a political organization which grappled directly and fundamentally with the growing injustice which marked the dealings between Exploiters and the Exploited

It's always going to be a fight for anyone who isn't an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn't have a fight.

To have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rumselling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, it is too grossly insulting to... be longer quietly submitted to.

I'm going to continue to stand with the people that are being oppressed.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that's been discriminated against, knows what it's like.

Trans folk, especially of color, should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and liberate ourselves.

There's a burden of responsibility for me to show up correct - in my head, if I don't do it right, then I'll get shut out, and then other trans women of color will be shut out.

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

Those that have a voice have to speak for those of us who are silenced.

If you're a minority party that doesn't control any branch of government, you're more likely to be ignored.

If we aren’t intersectional, some of us, the most vulnerable, are going to fall through the cracks.

Much of what I do now stems from my rage at segregation and discrimination. I can't stand to see children not able to do anything, anybody not able to do what they can do. The daily lessons of exclusion, having hand-me-down books in schools, of seeing ambulances turn away and not give health care for people lying in the streets who are migrant workers. Everything I do today stems from that segregated existence.

For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.

Racism in our countries is a fact in that the indian is not allowed to be a politician or aspire to being head of state. It has reached the point that 99% of the indigenous women have not gone to school. The indigenous are condemned to live in a situation designed to exterminate them. They receive a pittance of a salary, they neither speak nor write the language, politics dictates their situation. Is this slavery? I don't know what it's called. It is not the same as before because we are in modern times.

Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers.

If power is abstraction, which many black men, black women, and people of color have very little voice in, well, then I want to sit at the table.