Robert Kennedy Quotes

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too.

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

Let me say … how deeply grateful all people of good will are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality.

You know, Jesse Jackson is just trying to stir up a hornet's nest.

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

Too often, advances in civil rights or women's rights are undermined by wrong-headed legislation or weak-kneed political leadership.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

Even here in America, people are fighting for civil rights 45 years after the civil rights movement.

It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.

If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything ... that smacks of discrimination or slander.

I’ve never been involved in a Civil Rights campaign that was not ill-timed

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

The Ballot or the Bullet

Martin Luther King told American Blacks not to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

When I taught a civil rights class at the University of Maryland Law School, I would do an exercise with my students. I'd write 'civil rights' on the board and ask them to tell me what immediately came to mind.

Civil rights activists and union activists shared not just common values and objectives but also common enemies.

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

My father acted as the Illinois Branch president of the NAACP and so we spent a lot of time in the marches and the rallies working on behalf of people of color.

I grew up in Illinois in an environment where my parents were very politically active in the civil rights movement.

My mom pushed me in a baby carriage at Martin Luther King rallies. My grandfather was a union organizer. And to me, there is no room - no room - for discrimination of any kind. To me, it's just an anathema.

We have to fight for what's right the same way the brothers and sisters that came before us did. The ultimate example, and there are many others, was The Stonewall Inn. They were pushed until they could take no more.

I want some help on this. I'm being very honest, i want some ideas, as somebody who was arrested 50 years ago fighting for Civil Rights trying to desegregate schools in Chicago, who spent his whole life fighting against racism, I want your ideas. What do you think we can do? What can we do?

There's a lot of injustice in the world and it's what I sing about in my music and what I try to confront in my life as an activist.

A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.