Bernice Johnson Reagon Quotes

I'm just going to go live life. I'm going to go enjoy life. I have nothing left to hide. I am kind of a free person, a free soul.

Every day you wake up is an opportunity to go beyond, and that 's why I let my band go right now. For the first time in my life I'm just roaming around, vagabonding.

Social change without music would be void of soul. Nonviolence without music, meditation, action, and a willingness to take risks probably doesn't exist.

Organize! Educate! Agitate!

I was in Toronto when the big Women's March was going on, and I thought, 'Well, I've never been to a protest, and I can't sit this one out, and they're having a gathering here in Toronto, so I may as well go,' and gosh, I didn't expect 60,000 or 65,000 people to be there - it was huge! It was something that I didn't feel I could sit out at all.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.

Journey gave me a magic wand, and it's changed the man that I am. I was able to muster this kind of courage that I never, ever had in my life.

Gandhi protested against restrictive policies. So did 'Guru.'

Short of finding a place on the witness protection programme, you don't get many opportunities to completely reinvent your life. Going to university changes that. Away from home, away from parents, away from anyone who remembers you from school, you can pretend to be far cooler and more experienced than you are.

I think that we should remember that social change can happen when people join together with some strength.

You know in democracy you can protest peacefully and I'm sure you know it will have at least some kind of impact. You need to raise your voice. If you can't do much, you know, but at least raise you voice. Raising your voice is something you need to do.

We're all anti-royalist, anti-patriarch. Cos it's 1989. Time to get real.

Whether you want to do a letter-writing campaign or a march or start a social media hashtag - whatever it is - know that there are people out there that are thinking exactly like you're thinking and are also afraid to take that next and very important step.

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.

Several years ago, I had the words 'let the music set you free' tattooed behind my left ear, as it really is my mantra for life.

Some people say that given the government's firm stance against genuine universal suffrage, our demands are impossible to achieve. But I believe activism is about making the impossible possible.

When white supremacy has you down, honey, go out dancing, have as much fun as you can.

I'm really embracing that very out, very loud, very free persona that I am now but that I didn't get to be in high school.

To the extent that Bernie Sanders was about building a movement of people where challenging things that up until then were unchallengeable, then absolutely we want to be seen in that mould.

At the women's march, we held signs that said, 'Today we march, tomorrow we run.' They didn't believe us, but it's coming to pass.

Singing was a liberating experience for me.

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

In one day I had altered my life; my life, therefore, was alterable. This simple axiom did not call out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin. I could feel it pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own free will.

A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.

I got on my knees and sort of communicated with the spirits. When I came out, I was in charge. I couldn't have acted that, I couldn't have written that.