Mohsen Makhmalbaf Quotes

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.

My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI.

I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.

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.

Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head.

Aside from my family, I have two great loves in my life: acting and the fight for social justice.

If the enemy could only know that Marcus Garvey is but a John the Baptist in the wilderness, that a greater and more dangerous Marcus Garvey is yet to appear, the Garvey with whom you will have to reckon for the injustice of the present generation.

Sometimes going to jail is just the price you have to pay for social reform or social change.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.

Oh, Diane Nash deserves her own film. Diane Nash is a freedom fighter who is still alive and kicking. She was one of the leaders of the desegregation of Nashville, basically. She was a student at Fisk University who was one of the founding members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

I am pretty heavy into causes. I'm an active Democrat, I boycott grapes, and I work for prison reform.

My mum taught me the power of protest.

I grew up reading Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Injustice has exhausted people but also pushed them to organize and fight back in very sophisticated ways.

There was a time that human rights was not even an issue in this country. Then prisoners' rights became an issue.

Nonviolent, visual protests have a long history of forming images that can quickly go viral and set a powerful tone for a moment.

Sometimes music isn't the way to talk politics, you know?

All good art should be political, I think, and inevitably it all becomes political really, in one way or another.

When I think about protest, I worry so much that people think about it only as standing in the streets. And I say that as someone who has been standing in the streets of cities across the country - but at the root of it is this idea of telling the truth in public.

I'd been focused on trying to start civil disobedience since 2010. I'd tried many things and they hadn't worked. So I went on a retreat and prayed, with some psychedelic medicines. It was really intense and I prayed for what I called the codes for social change and within a month my prayer was answered.

You're starting to see more and more athletes recognizing their reach and how much leverage and power that they have in their celebrity and in their platform. And more and more guys are trying to use that leverage to better their communities, to better this country and are speaking out on injustice.

I feel so proud to see young people standing up against the injustice to stand up and say that "All lives matter." They're following in the footsteps of those who came before them.

There's still injustice happening in my world. I sing my songs at concerts and I'm so grateful that the people are ready to hear them.

It is my hope that people today will see that, in another time, in another period, when we saw the need for people to speak up, to organize, to mobilize, and to do something about injustice, we came together.