Muhammad Ali Quotes

There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up. [...] The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. [...] To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

The signs of the Vietnam War protestors said "Make Love not War!" It didn't seem to me that they were capable of either.

Just wage a total war against these tyrants; I think we will do very well and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

You can only watch injustice go on for so long until you're compelled to say something. To speak out against it.

Some laws are wrong, and we have an obligation to speak out against those laws wherever they are.

Despair and frustration will not shake our belief that the resistance is the only way of liberation.

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.

The removal of a tyrant is not merely justifiable; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist.

What does the term "anti-American" mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to freedom of speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?

Agitated by revolutionary movements, these grow in proportion to the force that resists them.

The Congress having done me the honor of electing me brigadier-general in their service, is an event which must put an end, for a while, perhaps forever, to the quiet scheme of life I had prescribed for myself; for, though entirely unexpected and undesired by me, the will of an oppressed people, compelled to choose between liberty and slavery, must be obeyed.

I would have felt ashamed if I had not been part of the resistance and part of fighting back against the forces of the state.

We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you'll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you're going to have to keep on saying that. You're going to have to say that I am a proletariat; I am the people.

We will change things if people stand up for what they believe in against injustice and death to save themselves and the future of America - and the world.

As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist

A lot of people died fighting tyranny. The least I can do is vote against it.

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

When I was arrested opposing the war in Vietnam in 1965, as I said about 20 or 30% of people were opposed to the war. By 1968, more than half of Americans were opposed to the war. If you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.

Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.

Sometimes there's truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.

The rights of no oppressed people have ever yet been obtained by a voluntary act of justice on the part of the oppressors.

Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.

When the fear of jail disappears, repression puts heart into the people.

We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience... But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.