Audre Lorde Quotes

To throw oneself to the side of the oppressed is the only dignified thing to do in life.

Denying any person their humanity is a game we should all stop playing.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress....This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

We need to realize that we should be on the side of any human being who is oppressed.

Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle....goa ts are used for sacrificial offerings and not lions.

The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.

I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation.

Where I come from, if you see your family and friends' civil rights being taken away, you speak up and do everything you can to keep that from happening!

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

The cry of the oppressed has entered not only into my ears, but into my soul, so that while I live, I cannot hold my peace.

Peace does not mean just to stop wars, but also to stop oppression and injustice.

This is not a question of expediency, but of right. In antebellum days the proposition was not, “Are the blacks good enough to be free?” but, “Have they the right?” So today the question is not, “Will outrages result from freeing humanity?” but, “Has it the right to life, the means of life, the opportunities of happiness?”

The vision of Israel's prophets became the pillar of fire leading the struggle in support of the weak and the different towards equality.

Wherever there was injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion.

You can only appreciate freedom when you find yourself in a position to fight for someone else's freedom and not worry about your own.

I have in my bones, and in my blood, the knowledge that you have to help the people who are persecuted.

Human suffering is not, nor should it ever be, a political issue.

In every man's mind the good seeds of liberty are planted, and he who brings his fellow down so low, as to make him contented with a condition of slavery, commits the highest crime against God and man. Brethren, your oppressors aim to do this. They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind-when they have embittered the sweet waters of the light which shines from the word of God-then, and not till then has American slavery done its perfect work.

The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.

Let us be enraged about injustice, but let us not be destroyed by it.

My philosophy is such that I am not going to vote against the oppressed. I have been oppressed, and so I am always going to have avote for the oppressed, regardless of whether that oppressed is black or white or yellow or the people of the Middle East, or what. I have that feeling.

And let's just be honest, there is no such place called 'justice,' if by that we envision a finish line, or a point at which the battle is won and the need to continue the struggle over with. After all, even when you succeed in obtaining a measure of justice, you're always forced to mobilize to defend that which you've won. There is no looming vacation. But there is redemption in struggle.

Anywhere where the humanity of people is undermined, anywhere where people are left in the dust, there we will find our cause.

The meticulous care for the rights of the least among us is the sin qua non of nonviolence.