Ray Stannard Baker Quotes

This should be the message of Occupy Wall Street: We just want a chance; our government needs to give us a chance.

Young people have been at the forefront of every great social movement in our country's history.

We should try to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to find a great life. It's a quest that will require political will and ingenious policies. President Obama's proposed expansion of the earned-income tax credit goes in this direction, but we need more.

What I intended to accomplish was to rouse the student body, not by means of an organization, but solely by my simple words; to urge them, not to violence, but to moral insight into the existing serious deficiencies of our political system.

What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does.

The role model approach to social change is no substitute for challenging unjust employment practices, educational policies and housing.

I think the NAACP isn't recognized enough for all of the work it does, especially in the field of law. They may have faded from view over the last couple of decades, but they are fighting the good fight.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

What the labor movement did in this country is to make sure that capitalism worked.

I don't believe we need to choose between addressing economic issues and addressing issues of social or racial justice.

As someone who has dealt with economic hardship, I am committed to making the changes necessary for our country to become more equitable. And to do so, I believe we need to think big.

It's not enough to celebrate the ideals that we're built on, liberty and justice and equality for all. Those just can't be words on paper, the work of every generation is to make those words mean something, concrete in the lives of our children. And we won't get there as long as kids in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York or Appalachia or the Mississippi delta or the Pine Ridge reservation believe that their lives are somehow worthless.

There is a naive belief that injustice only had to be pointed out in order to be cured.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.

I think this is a moment of a lot of possibilities, and openings. Occupy and the 99% movement are really going to break through, and we are going to create a new economy, an economy that we need that works for everyone. Where everyone works, everyone counts and everyone contributes.

We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life's highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished.

We can only live the changes we wish to see: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create. We must break the obsolete social and economic systems that divide the world between the over-privileged and the under-privileged. Each of us, whether government leader or protester, business executive or worker, professor or student, share a common guilt.

Part of people's concern is just the sense that around the world the old order isn't holding and we're not quite yet to where we need to be in terms of a new order that's based on a different set of principles, that's based on a sense of common humanity, that's based on economies that work for all people.

Saying I want to pay women a fair wage is doing something and saying young black people deserve not to be called super predators but to be engaged from an economic standpoint that gives them an equal opportunity says doing something.I'm tired of talking.

Do I consider myself a part of the casino capitalist process? No I don't. I believe in a society where all people do well.

Those of us who grew up in the '50s and '60s, we had the dream that this could be turned around, and the earth could be back in balance, and that we could level the playing field with men and women and pay, and you know, minority groups having equal opportunity. We just magically thought this was all going to happen: we were going to have clean food, and organic this, and conscious that, and it just didn't happen.

If we can create a climate among people that says that any serious candidate for president, Senate, governor, [the] House is going to have to talk about income inequality, raising wages in America, trade policy - that's a huge success. It's not putting pressure on a candidate. It's mobilizing people.

It's not exactly courageous to be an anti-racist these days; a hundred years ago, it was.

All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.