Hugo Claus Quotes

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

All over this world people are standing up for freedom.

There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize.

I'm not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody's boot on my neck.

This is Not Another Revolution. This is a Civil Rights Movement

Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry.

I don't want tea, I want justice!

I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.

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.

it is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks.

There's still injustice happening in my world. I sing my songs at concerts and I'm so grateful that the people are ready to hear them.

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

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.

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

How can you ask someone to live in the world and not have something to say about injustice?

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.

A grievance is a political action. It's not just African-Americans.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

I'm going to fight for human rights, whether I do it silently behind the scenes or vocally so that I get locked up. I can't just sit back; it's not in my nature. I can't sit back and blindly ignore it, and I won't.

In less than a century we experienced great movement. The youth movement! The labor movement! The civil rights movement! The peace movement! The solidarity movement! The women's movement! The disability movement! The disarmament movement! The gay rights movement! The environmental movement! Movement! Transformation! Is there any reason to believe we are done?

Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.

Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head.

Anybody intelligent enough to realize what America is, is not going to sit around and do nothing about it. They're going to be the same way that I am. They're going to be the same way our fans are. They're going to be pissed.

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

No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others.