Barbara Kruger Quotes

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

If you are going to organize and ask for commitment, you cannot go to the most desperately poor. They are not likely to take action. If you stand on a man's head and push it into the dirt, he may not even see the heel of your boot. But if his whole face is already above ground, he can see your heel and he can see freedom ahead.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

I'm not sure I'm trying to communicate a message. I'm just trying to be part of the movement away from the unacceptable present.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.

Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.

Science fiction isn't just thinking about the world out there. It's also thinking about how that world might be - a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world we live in, they - and all of us - have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

For millions of women and men around the world, the playwright Eve Ensler is a beloved figure. She represents the epitome of the politically engaged artist, someone who uses her creative brilliance to illuminate injustice and give voice to the voiceless.

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

We had no more courage than Harriet Tubman or Marcus Garvey had in their times. We just had a more vulnerable enemy.

I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

I like to be able to raise people's consciousness, yes. And to remind that those of us involved in the receiving end of the oppression, we have a duty.

Our bodies must always be wherever that struggle and the moment we forget that, the moment we become lazy, the moment we sit back, then then the evil ones do their ordained tasks to us.

Movements begin when oppressed people make - and keep remaking - a deeply inward decision to stop consenting to external demands that contradict a critical inner truth, the truth that they are worthy of respect.

We happen to be the vanguard of that revolutionary struggle because we are the most dispossessed.

I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.

Fight the power that be. Fight the power.

An oppressed people will always rise.

When you're talking about an authority figure oppressing against people, it's the people that hold that authority figure up. If you want to get free of this bondage, then we need to think about ways to free ourselves rather than looking to the oppressors to free us.

It's important for me, politically, to see that theater isn't just about the powerful.