Gordon Parks Quotes

I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.

I think I've always had these two currents, equally strong, of wanting to change the world and make the world better and fight injustices and fight violence, and then being an artist, which is a very different strain.

I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera.

I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil - along with the evil of racism - with a camera.

One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better

We have learned that change cannot come through war. War is not a feasible tool to use in fighting against the oppression we face. War has caused more problems. We cannot embrace that path.

I don't care much about the outcome. I'd like for people to feel better and have better lives, but I don't think that's in the cards through political action. I think bloodshed is still the way you get dramatic change. That'll never happen because they've got all the guns now. At least they've got the nice guns, the big ones, the ones with night vision.

The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.

I said, "OK, Ammon [Hennacy], I will try that." He said, "You came into the world armed to the teeth. With an arsenal of weapons, weapons of privilege, economic privilege, sexual privilege, racial privilege. You want to be a pacifist, you're not just going to have to give up guns, knives, clubs, hard, angry words, you are going to have lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed."

If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hava a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn’t the alphabed that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression.

I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak - nothing passive - nothing naïve - in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

Dr. King's policy was, if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.

I've always tried to be what I call militantly nonviolent. I don't believe that anyone could seriously accuse me of not being totally committed to the breakdown of segregation.

I hate Illinois Nazis.

Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.

Photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

Nonviolence is the only way. Even if you achieve your goal by violent means there are always side effects, and these can be worse than the problem. Violence is against human nature.

In America, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the Occupy movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.

Each of us contributes our own piece to the whole, each in our own way, each in our own time with the gifts and talents that are ours. You ask about possible vehicles for change: question, stand, speak, act. Engage in unruly behavior. Disturb the status quo. Take direct action. Commit civil disobedience. Make art. Build community. Dance. Sing. Farm. Cook. Create something beautiful and then give it away. Find your own monkey wrench and use it with the force of love. Sharpen your pencil. Vote.

Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in America and never, ever will be!

When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite.

Nonviolence is the most potent technique for oppressed people. Unearned suffering is redemptive.

Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.

The purpose of art is the fight for freedom.

I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen knife and some people she'd like to kill