Margaret Atwood Quotes

There are good reasons for being in jail - for protesting.

I love the protests. And if you think about it, what better way to send a message to Wall Street than by sitting in a pup tent banging on a drum.

Be prepared to organize nonviolent workshops - a teach-in around what is happening in America today. Organize your teachers and schoolmates, and be prepared to engage in some action.

To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.

From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.

I talked to Shailene Woodley the next day [after arrest]. She was fine, and she was very happy. She knew that it brought attention to a cause that she cared very much about. She was in high spirits and knew that was a possibility when she was protesting. The people who arrested her, if they were trying to prove a point of not to protest, they only helped the cause.

I'm always happy when I'm protesting.

You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.

A grievance is a political action. It's not just African-Americans.

As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.

I'm thinking of love in action and not something where you say, "Love your enemies," and just leave it at that, but you love your enemies to the point that you're willing to sit-in at a lunch counter in order to help them find themselves. You're willing to go to jail.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

We need more radicalism among us before we can speak as becomes a suffering, oppressed, and persecuted people.

Nonviolence cannot be learnt by staying at home.

I favor massive civil disobedience, among other things. It is not the only thing that is used to protest any grievance in society. But it is one of the most effective under certain conditions.

There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize.

Get informed. Get outraged. Get inspired. Get active.

We can't continue assuming that politics is something which is decided elsewhere by distant leaders in a distant capital. Protest is insufficient too. If people who are willing to put time into demonstrations also prove willing to work on behalf of candidates in local elections - or to become candidates themselves - they will achieve far more. If all of this upheaval provokes more involvement, then we have a slim chance of ending up with more vibrant democracies eventually. The alternative, as you've hinted, is that democracy fails altogether.

They call me "a teacher, a fomenter of violence." I would say point blank, "That is a lie. I'm not for wanton violence, I'm for justice."

Singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' all the places we've been, it takes on a different meaning everywhere. When you sing the line, 'How many years can a people exist, before they're allowed to be free?' in a prison yard for political prisoners in El Salvador; if you have sung it to a group of union organizers, who have all been in jail, in South Korea; if you've sung to Jews in the Soviet Union who have been refused exit visas; if you've sung it with Bishop Tutu protesting apartheid, the song breathes, it lives, it has a contemporary currency.

Activism is setting a goal of something you would like to be different, and figuring out what would have to change to achieve that goal. It's sort of like math.

My faith in non-co-operation is as bright as ever.

We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things.

I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.

That was exciting to be able to comment on civil rights. I mean, the civil rights movement that young people don't know about today, but Martin Luther King was considered by the establishment press in the early years of the sit-in movement as a dangerous man, and he was the equivalent at that time as Malcolm X. And he was told to stop his demonstrations; they were against the law and all of that. Now that he's sainted and sanctified we've forgotten.