David Harris Quotes

The inability of those in power to still the voices of their own consciences is the great force leading to change.

Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.

I have referred to myself as an accidental activist on more than one occasion.

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

To be a revolutionary you have to be a human being. You have to care about people who have no power.

Political evils must be sorely felt before they can be removed.

I’ve never been involved in a Civil Rights campaign that was not ill-timed

Basic moral values must therefore first be internalized in the hearts and minds of its people before we can hope to enforce legislation reflecting these values

When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.

I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.

Civil rights activists and union activists shared not just common values and objectives but also common enemies.

There are real consequences when women speak out. It's really dangerous, and it takes real courage. We are still speaking out against a white male majority. Forget the glass ceiling. We haven't even broken the glass floor!

It's indifference and ignorance that stops people from doing the right thing.

The question is, What type of human do I want to be? How do I want to use my platform? Do I want to be safe, under the umbrella of my white privilege? Or do I want to push back and resist?

If we are not actively fighting against regressive ideologies, we are contributing to making them grow.

If you're an activist trying to do something important, I salute you. Most of us just give ourselves ethical brownie points for watching Channel 2 instead of Channel 3, like characters in a broad dystopian satire.

We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience... But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries, because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.

Today, whether it is a student who holds a sit-in to get the army recruiters off his campus, or the mother of a dead soldier who refuses to leave the front gate of the president's ranch, we continue to be saved by brave people who risk ridicule and rejection but end up turning huge tides of public opinion in the direction of righteousness. We owe them enormous debts of gratitude. It is not easy to stand up for what is right, especially when everyone else is afraid to leave the comfortable path of conformity.

A status not freely chosen or entered into by an individual or a group is necessarily one of oppression and the oppressed are by their nature (i.e., oppressed) forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition

I said, "If I was a Negro girl-" He placed his fingers across my lips so I tasted his saltiness. "We can't think of changing our skin," he said. "Change the world-that's how we gotta think."

But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system.

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

Help and you will abolish apathy-the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil.

I don't think Dr. King helped racial harmony, I think he helped racial justice. What I profess to do is help the oppressed and if I cause a load of discomfort in the white community and the black community, that in my opinion means I'm being effective, because I'm not trying to make them comfortable. The job of an activist is to make people tense and cause social change.