Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes

The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

All the efforts of Lafayette, Kosciuszko and Garibaldi, and all the faith of Mazzini, Mickiewicz and Michelet, were defeated by the fundamental truth that the people they sought to liberate and make happy were simply not interested.

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.

It is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

[In the French Revolution] there is much to approve and much to condemn…. An essential change was necessary for the happiness and dignity of a great people, long in a state of degradation.

Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.

The class struggle … is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers

We are sons of the Mexican Revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking, bread and justice. Our revolution will not be armed, but we want the existing social order to dissolve, we want a new social order.

The fight against racism must be seen as a revolutionary one.

Our aim is not to die. It is to carry out the revolution, to make a reality of our ideas. We must live, to get them accepted by the people.

Every successful social movement in this country's history has used disruption as a strategy to fight for social change. Whether it was the Boston Tea Party to the sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South, no change has been won without disruptive action.

The 'Grace of Kings' begins as a very dark, complicated world filled with injustices - among them the oppressed position of women - but gradually transforms into something better through a series of revolutions. But since real social change takes a long time, even by the end of the book, only the seeds of deep change have been planted.

Marxism is the only doctrine that both satisfies the demands for progress and provides a safe outlet for moral expression in a skeptical age.

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.

It’s a new world, brother. And we, the downtrodden, are taking it back. (Madoc)

If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.

Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized.

It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make the strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse.

it is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks.

Civil disobedience is the only nonviolent escape from the soul-destroying heat of violence.

The Latin American cause is about all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge.

The hope of remaking the world is indispensable in the struggle of oppressed men and women.

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

The powerful don't make revolutions