Michelle Alexander Quotes

I had incorrectly, for all of my adult life until 2008, believed the biggest voting myth that exists - that ex-felons cannot vote.

There have been more people disenfranchised in Washington than there have been in Kuwait.

Nationwide about 1 in 7 black men are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised due to felon disenfranchisement laws.

People should not be able to vote to take away the rights of others.

This is our right [to vote]. I urge people to come out. This hasn't - you know, the courts of law have refused to take this up in a just way. This needs to be decided in the court of public opinion.

This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.

It's hard to say that something is legitimate when a whole portion of the country can't vote and doesn't vote.

In our country we must trust the people to hear and see both the good and the bad and to choose the good.

I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting - anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.

When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.

You can't afford to hate politics. The politics of this country is democracy. Democracy is by the people, of the people and for the people. The day people stop taking active part in the politics of this country, democracy will not survive.

People on probation and parole are typically denied the right to vote, and in eleven states people are denied the right to vote even after completion of their sentences.

[Vladimir] Putin is an enemy of political dissent. The U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places where our ideas are in conflict.

Voting in this country has essentially been relegated to a very fledging group of election officials, who receive no training and operate on shoestring budgets on one hand, and political consultants whose job is to get their candidates elected on the other. And when you have that kind of scenario, it's really hard to describe yourself as a vibrant democracy. It's an embarrassment.

People were threatened, folks was put in jail just because we wanted people to try to register to vote.

Politics is democracy's way of handling public business. We won't get the type of country in the kind of world we want unless people take part in the public's business.

Democracy is based on the majority principle. This is especially true in a country such as ours where the vast majority have been systematically denied their rights. At the same time, democracy also requires that the rights of political and other minorities be safeguarded.

The rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.

A man's rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.

The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights.

Millions of people are unable to vote due to felony convictions with the highest rates among black men. People in prison are denied the right to vote in 48 states, and while we accept that as normal in the United States, in other western democracies people in prison do have the right to vote.

But in this country we have one great privilege which they don't have in other countries. When a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off. That's the finest asset we've got - the ballot box.

Russia has made its choice in favor of democracy. Fourteen years ago, independently, without any pressure from outside, it made that decision in the interests of itself and interests of its people - of its citizens. This is our final choice, and we have no way back. There can be no return to what we used to have before.

I can't even vote in America!