Keith Ellison Quotes

If you only make fights that you're going to win, there would be no women's vote in America, there would be no civil rights laws in the country.

We shall strike. We shall organize boycotts. We shall demonstrate and have political campaigns. We shall pursue the revolution we have proposed. We are sons and daughters of the farm workers' revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking bread and justice.

My job is to steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles. And people who are fighting on a, on a daily basis, at a grass roots level.

The Black Lives Matter movement, the various Occupy movements in Spain and the rest of Europe, in this country, and elsewhere serve as an example of what can be done, and how strong the voices for positive change and truly democratic progress can be.

The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women's movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights.

If you join a fight for social justice you may win or lose, but just by being part of the struggle, you win, and your life will be better for it.

It is time for the next generations to continue our struggle against social injustice and for the rights of humanity. It is in your hands.

My hope for America and the activists is that they never, ever go back to sleep, and they keep fighting for social justice, equality, and decency.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

The hospital strikers have demonstrated that you don't get a job done unless you show the Man you're not afraid...If you're not willing to pay that price, then you don't deserve the rewards or benefits that go along with it.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish - people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people - and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

I'm trying to stand up so that the middle class, the working class, can finally have a say. I put them as my No. 1 priority.

President Obama started in public life not as an elected official but as a community organizer. He worked with churches and other groups on the south side of Chicago to push public leaders to fight poverty, improve the local school system and make housing more affordable, and to bring about the change the community needed and deserved.

Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.

Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the struggle for equal rights.

It's undeniable there's been remarkable progress for African-Americans in this country. They've been elected senators and governors and running major corporations. But obviously we still have a long way to go.

I want my daughters to be respected as human beings; that's the country I'm fighting for.

The song 'If I Had a Hammer' is geared toward people who don't have a hammer. Maybe before I had a hammer I thought I'd hammer in the morning and hammer in the evening. But once you get a hammer, you find you don't really hammer as much as you thought you would.

It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

Martin Luther King would celebrate the symbolic status (of having a black president), but he would examine what the real substance was. And if he saw that poor and working people were not at the center of public policy, he would be deeply, deeply upset.

It doesn't matter who you are. Everyone has something to offer the movement of justice

Commit yourself to the noble struggle for human rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country and a finer world to live in.