Richard Norton Smith Quotes

I became politicised in my mid teens, at the time of ska and 2 Tone and the Anti-Nazi League, when I'd get dressed up for a night out in my white socks and loafers, and the last thing I'd hear is, 'Have a good night - be careful of the police.'

I am the people, I'm not the pig. You got to make a distinction. And the people are going to have to attack the pigs. The people are going to have to stand up against the pigs. That's what the Panthers is doing, that's what the Panthers are doing all over the world.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life - into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood.

'Easy Rider' was never a motorcycle movie to me. A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.

It's very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.

A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything.

With these raids the backbone of the radical movement in America is broken.

Mr. President, we are going to march on Washington. The people are restless. The Black masses are restless.

The uproar of the late '60s - the antiwar movement, black riots, angry women. It was a wonderful time.

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

The so-called civil rights movement as it exists today is used as a Communist program for revolution in America.

If civil disobedience is the way to go about change, than I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco

The youth of this country are not behind what is going on. We all know that. If you looked at a [political] map of the United States 25 and under, it's all-revealing. It's a unified map.

I'm beginning to think [Ted] Cruz had a good convention, that if [Donald] Trump goes down, Cruz is pretty well positioned to be the Republican major figure in four, six or even within two years.

Any time the negro becomes involved in mature political action, then the resistance of the politicians who benefit from the exploited political system as it now stands will be forced to put, exercise more violent action to deprive the negro of his mature political action.

I was very much a child of the 1960s. I protested the Vietnam War and grew up in a fairly politicized home. My father was like a cross between William Kunstler and Zorba the Greek. I grew up among left-wing lawyers.

Republican Party hasn't been black friendly over the many centuries in this country.

The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they're not!

I want to just take a moment to thank the Teabaggers. Thank you so much for helping us pass health care, for resurrecting the Obama presidency. I know they're saying, 'Why are you thanking me? I was so against it, I marched on Washington with tea bags hanging off my Founding Fathers costume, with a gun on my hip and a picture of Obama dressed as Hitler, screaming about his birth certificate.' And America saw that and said, 'I think I'll go with the calm black man.'

The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns'n'Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.

I think Robert F. Kennedy really, finally, cared; he realized that all of the rhetoric had to be put down into some form of action. That's perhaps the reason they killed him. They don't care what you say, you can say as much as you want to, provided you don't do anything. If you start to do something and your shuffling raises too much dust, they will disestablish you. That's what happened to Martin Luther King.

The Tea Party thing is only apt in some ways. The activism in the town halls, that looks superficially like it. But what the Tea Party did was, they went after the party, the Republican Party, as their vehicle. And parties is how you change history.

I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

In coming to Atlantic City, we believed strongly that we were right. In fact, it was just right for us to come to challenge the seating of the regular Democratic Party from Mississippi. But we didn't think when we got there that we would meet people, that actually the other leaders of the Movement would differ with what we felt was right.