William Kunstler Quotes

The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn

We need to also act out, and anything that [Donald] Trump does, anything he's trying to do that we don't agree with or anything this country is doing in general that we don't agree with, we need to protest, we need to make our voices heard. And that has to go beyond Twitter - for me as well.

The purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI.

King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.

Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common: They are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause.

Direct action means resort to non-constitutional methods that can take any form which many suit the conditions under which we live. We cannot eliminate any methods.

The absolute key issue is: how do you create enough political pressure? It's up to us to create that political will and there are tried and tested techniques for doing that. So we're talking about the need for civil disobedience that escalates into a rebellion and uprising.

Each of us should choose which course of action we must take; education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes, but let it not be said that we did nothing.

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

Be prepared to organize nonviolent workshops - a teach-in around what is happening in America today. Organize your teachers and schoolmates, and be prepared to engage in some action.

I think that any time you look at the fact that boycotts have historically led to change, whatever temporary inconvenience there may be, it in the long run leads toward, in my opinion, a better change for everybody.

You wanna know how you know you're informed as a protestor? They don't show your interview on TV.

I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change. I am far lazier than that.

If civil disobedience is the way to go about change, than I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco

I love the protests. And if you think about it, what better way to send a message to Wall Street than by sitting in a pup tent banging on a drum.

...dissent, protest, presures of a wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards "justice, freedom and democracy" within its domains.

If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come through citizen's movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.

When you hear me say "by any means necessary," I mean exactly that. I believe in anything that is necessary to correct unjust conditions-political, economic, social, physical, anything that is necessary.

There must be engagement: there must be protest.

There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it. It is a corrective to the sluggishness of "the proper channels," a way of breaking through passages blocked by tradition and prejudice. It is disruptive and troublesome, but it is a necessary disruption, a healthy troublesome.

Activism that challenges the status quo, that attacks deeply rooted problems, is not for the faint of heart.