Joan Cusack Quotes

I often traveled to Nicaragua to speak against repressive policies by the Sandinista government.

My mom worked as a psychiatric social worker. She was interested in people, and I guess I am, too. So we would talk about the people that we knew, and why they behaved the way they did.

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

I've been proud to be the chair of the Stop the War coalition, proud to be associated with the Stop the War coalition.

For a while I thought about studying medicine at school and becoming a doctor because I've always been interested in psychology and how people's minds operate. But I'm able to explore some of that as an actor and ultimately I think it seems more interesting.

My parents were active in the anti-war movement in the 1960s, so I grew up with a tradition of civic activism around our dinner table and going to different marches for different causes.

At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I started taking psychology courses. I was interested in the nature of the human mind, the structure itself, pathologies with which it is afflicted. I really intended to be a writer all along, but I needed to take a subject that I could make a living at, either teaching it or doing it.

There has been far too much hypocrisy in the field of civil rights. It is easy enough to give rousing speeches or call for legislation which has no possibility of passage.

I'm a person who's always been politically active and passionate about people's rights.

If people take a knee, and the National Football League players want to take a knee, they should take a knee at night, every night, and thank God in Heaven Donald J. Trump is president of the United States.

As a left-wing campaigner for 35 years, I've been arrested on picket lines, led anti-imperialist demonstrations and spoken at anti-deportation protests outside police stations. I've made speeches at street rallies, in prisons and universities and at pubs.

The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.

You just have to find your activism, and don't let anyone tell you what that should look like. If you're doing the work, and you're getting someone to think, you're on the right path.

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.

We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided! Let's fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us.

Democracy is not what we hate the most and what we fear the most. We need to stand up.

What first got me involved in politics was being 14, and a youth organizer comes to my house with a van full of 14 year old girls. "Hey, you want to go to the beach with us? But first we're going to go support the cannery workers' strike in Watsonville."

We're here to let the Democrats know that the grass roots and the anti-war movement elected them to create change.

That's where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.

If I wasn't a singer, I'd be a bloodclaat revolutionary.

I'm always happy when I'm protesting.

Have you ever taken a serious political stand on anything? Yeah. Sure. For twenty-four hours once I refused to eat grapes.

Jesse Jackson's wife was arrested in Puerto Rico while protesting the naval bombings there. Jesse said he was holding a meeting with four of his secretaries to decide what to do and that these meetings could run well into the night.

We need to also act out, and anything that [Donald] Trump does, anything he's trying to do that we don't agree with or anything this country is doing in general that we don't agree with, we need to protest, we need to make our voices heard. And that has to go beyond Twitter - for me as well.

After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's, I got this rather angry letter from a gay-and-lesbian group that was organizing a protest against the magazine. It was the same old problem: political groups have almost no sense of irony.