William Kunstler Quotes

From tea parties to the election in Massachusetts, we are witnessing the single greatest political pushback in American history.

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

The riot isn't seen in the movie, but it is alluded to. He has this one speech that gives a great sense of texture and paints a picture of what was happening in Harlem then.

A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

In the sixties, for anybody to suggest that the government didn't have our best interests at heart and policemen sometimes killed people would have automatically made them a radical firebrand lefty. That's not the case anymore.

Revolution For the Hell of It

The March on Washington was not a climax but a new beginning.

I have been arrested several times protesting.

Portland has a proud history of protest.

As a protester, I protested because I had to, not because it was exciting. I don't want to get tear-gassed again.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.

I'm not an anarchist. I'm not saying, "Burn it to the ground."

You have someone like Colin or many of the other athletes who have knelt, especially athletes of colour, and if you're not respecting what they're saying, if you're not believing their charges of police brutality or racial inequality, you're saying that they're lying.

I'm a communist, man. I'm going to break the rules.

Kaepernick is a hero.

I don't know if you'd do a Marvel story on Ferguson, because it trivializes what the real flesh-and-blood people on the ground are doing there. But you can make an allegory and deal with the bigger questions.

Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.

Black history won't stop no bullets.

The point that I would make is it's easy for somebody like me to be critical of Colin Kaepernick, but I haven't suffered some of the same issues that Colin Kaepernick has. On some level, it's like, how dare I weigh in on what Kaepernick is doing or feeling?

The first generation of Russian terrorists came out of the '60s counterculture - the 1860s in Russia bearing a striking similarity to the 1960s in the United States, with Russian students growing their hair, following gurus who extolled the 'new man,' and starting communes.

When Black Lives Matter started, it was polarizing.

So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan's home.

Sometimes things need to get really bad before they can ever get better. Really bad can become untenable if enough people get sick of it. That was a big thing about why I ended up taking part in that rally [against police brutality] and ended up voicing my opinion and declaring what side I was standing on.

If I could come out in this book and advocate complete revolution and the violent overthrow of the United States of America, without being thrown in jail, I would not have written The Anarchist Cookbook, and there would be no need for it.

I think everybody understood what happened, why this consent decree came about after the Freddie Gray situation. There was tension on both sides.