Tarana Burke Quotes

You don't have to be a professional athlete to be heard - the most powerful tool you have is your voice.

Silence is complicity. Speak now or surrender your ground.

Don't waste any time mourning—organize!

People don't stay mobilized.

People and systems count on our silence to keep us exactly where we are.... in a world that wants us to whisper, I choose to yell.

True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.

You can only watch injustice go on for so long until you're compelled to say something. To speak out against it.

If the government fails to listen to your demands, then you will decide what is best for you.

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.

Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.

Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.

Anybody intelligent enough to realize what America is, is not going to sit around and do nothing about it. They're going to be the same way that I am. They're going to be the same way our fans are. They're going to be pissed.

If you have an opportunity to use your voice you should use it.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.

View talk radio not as entertainment but as a tool for organizing and action.

I want every American to stand up for his rights, even if he has to sit down for them.

The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community.

No matter what political cause compels us, we should always feel as though it's being threatened. We should use these causes, whatever they are, to bring people together and get each other excited about our role, so we feel like we can't stop and won't stop.

It's so important to get your voice heard, get out there, support what you believe in and what you wanna fight for.

You have to make an audience feel like they can - and want to - change something about what they are watching. And that might be the thing that galvanises them in the end, that makes them come out of themselves and say, 'No! Don't do that!'

The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light.

Participation in and of itself is an act against hopelessness. Speaking up is a gesture against hopelessness.

'Rise Up' is very necessary. Point blank.

I know we have to have people of good conscience who stand up against oppression. I know we have to have people who understand that social justice belongs to us all. And that wakes me up every morning, and that makes me fight even harder.

To be part of building a movement, you have to keep moving.