Kgalema Motlanthe Quotes

I'll never forget working to get my college, Wayne State University, to divest from the government in South Africa. This was the beginning of my activism, and the fight for social and economic justice has been a constant thread in my life.

Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.

I did organize something in high school like a school walkout. These kids were locked up in their school, they weren't allowed out, but 3,000 school kids from Sydney walked out and protested. And I organized it from my mom's office at work. And I was 12.

I never liked the status quo. Once I went to college, I got very involved in student activism.

All the way back to Dartmouth, I was part of the insurgency.

At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for.

One thing that I'd just remind young people of is that when John Lewis, who's a member of Congress today, defied George Wallace and led the march from Selma to Montgomery, he was 23 years old. Martin Luther King was the old man in the bunch, and he was 35, so young people need to know that they've always been an important part of our society, have always been at the forefront of pushing for a more just America, and we can't be successful without the impatience, the vigor that young people bring to the fight for social justice.

Dr. King used Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and to passive resistance.

In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

One individual can begin a movement that turns the tide of history. Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement, Mohandas Ganhi in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa are examples of people standing up with courage and non-violence to bring about needed changes.

I was involved in some peaceful protests.

I've learned how to measure what I say. Al Sharpton in 1986 was trying to be heard. I was a local guy and was like, 'Y'all are ignoring us.'

I've never been involved in any kind of political movement.

I engaged upon those activities because I believed that, in the dangerous circumstances which have been created in South Africa, it was my duty to do so.

If you compromise in any kind of movement or any kind of wave of revolution, if you sort of play the game, things are gonna change far more slowly than you need them to.

More people, especially young people, are realising that if they want change, they've got to go about it themselves - they can't depend on a particular person, i.e. me, to do all the work. They are less easy to fool than they used to be, they now know what's going on all over the world.

I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.

Activism has been very productive in our society.

I think this Occupy Wall Street thing is great. I think that is a good thing and that people need to stand up, voice their opinions, and be heard.

I've always had questions about what it meant to be a protester, to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace, who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody, are they really the radicals? We're not protesting from the outside. We're inside.

We have been saying "Freedom" for six years. What we are going to start saying now is "Black Power". We have begged the President. We've begged the federal government. That's all we've been doing, begging and begging. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them.

How many of you are willing to go to jail for freedom?

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.

People don't stay mobilized.