Samuel R. Delany Quotes

I'm not sure I'm trying to communicate a message. I'm just trying to be part of the movement away from the unacceptable present.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.

There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

Civil rights happened because youth got involved. The youth stood up and helped to break the pattern that their parents had got accustomed to living. The next generation has to take that stand for whatever it is, socially, that they are involved in.

No change can come if those who are impacted the most by discrimination are not willing to stand up for themselves.

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I'm trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

If you are going to organize and ask for commitment, you cannot go to the most desperately poor. They are not likely to take action. If you stand on a man's head and push it into the dirt, he may not even see the heel of your boot. But if his whole face is already above ground, he can see your heel and he can see freedom ahead.

It was imperative to make common cause with the oppressed in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors.

The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

All of the great social justice advances that we ever had in this country have come not from people with big titles and not from people at the top, but just from everyday people getting together saying 'Enough is enough. I'm going to change this, and I'm going to get involved, and I am going to be engaged.'

It is so sad that it takes so long for people to understand what needs to happen in order to be free.

Science fiction is the field that explores how change can affect us, for well or ill.

You gotta call it out first; it always has to be called out when we need social change, but this is how social change happens: you call it out. People had to call out child labor. People had to call out, 'Hey time's up; we need to vote. We live in this country.' People had to call out 'time's up' on enslaving people, you know.

If there's a theme in my work, it's that I like to focus on smart people who are facing oppression and who are fighting back against it.

In raising a people from slavery to freedom, you have called them to act on a new theatre; and it is a necessary part of your business, to teach them how to perform their parts.

Every night I get many letters, and after every talk I get many questions from people who say, "I want to change things. What can I do?" I never hear these questions from peasants in southern Colombia or Kurds in southeastern Turkey under miserable repression or anybody who is suffering. They don't ask what they can do; they tell you what they're doing.

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.

Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

Human kind is made up of two sexes, women and men. Is it possible that a mass is improved by the improvement of only one part and the other part is ignored? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains and the other half can soar into skies?

Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil.