Alicia Garza Quotes

It's like a 'chicken or the egg' thing. We're all part of the culture. We're reflecting it; we're changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing.

... legislating to regulate cultural change is like lassoing a locomotive with a cobweb.

Our ambitions are bold and so must be our desire to change and evolve our culture.

When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

I shall never accept that the law can be used to justify tragedy, to keep things as they are, to make us abandon our ideas of a different world. Law is the path of liberty, and must as such open the way to progress for everyone.

While that wasn't first and foremost in my mind, you can't get into this without being struck, on one side, by how far we've come, and then the other side, by how little things have changed.

The role model approach to social change is no substitute for challenging unjust employment practices, educational policies and housing.

Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.

The conditions of suffering that exist today in our impoverished communities are not acceptable. The reflection of those conditions are less concerning to me. And I work everyday about changing the conditions.

Things need shaking up politically, culturally.

What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.

If the culture you have is radically different from an 'experiment and take-risk' culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make - and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.

None of us are naïve enough to believe that moving around boxes on organization charts will change behavior. You have to change culture.

Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression … How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, "a chariot wheel" which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul.

An idea consisting of a social crime in one age becomes the very religion of humanity in the next

No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen's unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aerial navigation; but a change in public opinion..

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

The struggle for human rights and democracy are not always the same thing. Sometimes what you have to do is break cultural attitudes. Democracies aren’t necessarily very good at that…. It’s very hard for oppressed minorities to be given their due.

Huge inequality gaps in a democratic society will tend to erode the respect for and security of doctrines of private property. The large majority must either own property or have reasonable prospects of attaining property if they are to support and maintain private property laws and traditions.

The chaos in our world may have brought you close to despair, but if you are willing to look at reasons for hope, perhaps you are ready for the 'Aquarian Conspiracy.'