Millard Fillmore Quotes

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.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Injustice can never be stood for.

Revolution by the have-nots has a way of inducing a moral revelation among the haves.

Magazines and newspapers commonly took to celebrating the military valor of both Confederate and Union soldiers, as though bravery, rather than morality, were the chief quality to be commemorated.

Nobody really knows for sure how the Boxer Rebellion started. It began among the poor, and the history of the poor is rarely written down.

But you know, the system almost destroyed itself while it was goin' on trying to destroy us.

From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned.

Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.

Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

We face ... a moral crisis as a country and as a people,” said the president. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution ... peaceful and constructive for all.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

When you look at the times in history when change was brought about, there were two factors: crisis and leadership.

All past history with the exception of the primitive stages was the history of class struggles.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

History is made in the class struggle and not in bed.

I am certainly willing to fight for America as well as vote, but I shall fight just the way you did in the Civil War—at the end of a goose quill pen

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place.

Slavery in this country will yet cease, for it is wrong, but it will never be made to cease by the present efforts. They have on them, in my opinion, every mask of failure, for they are not made in the fear of God or with love to man. They may destroy the union, plunge this country into a civil war, break us up into a half dozen different confederacies, but abolish slavery as they are now attempting to do it – they never will. You may note my words, they never will.

It is a revolution; a revolution of the most intense character; in which belief in the justice, prudence, and wisdom of secession is blended with the keenest sense of wrong and outrage, and it can no more be checked by human effort for the time than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.

That means nigger citizenship!!!

the plain fact that throughout the world today organized groups of men by monopoly of economic and physical power, legal enactment and intellectual training are limiting with determination and unflagging zeal the development of other groups; and that the concentration of particularly economic power today puts the majority of mankind into slavery to the rest. But one thing is sure and that is that these ancestors of mine and their descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.

The position of what is generally called great people has of late become extremely difficult. They are more attacked and calumniated, and judged with less indulgence than private individuals. What they have lost in this way, they have not by any means regained in any other. Ever since the revolution of 1790 they are much less secure than they used to be, and the transition from sovereign power to absolute want has been as frequent as sudden.