Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

The fight still isn't people of colour versus white. It's the people versus the system built to keep us down. That's the first line of the Constitution. And the system is manmade but is made of no man. Everyone, regardless of class, creed, culture and ethnicity can fight the system and help to break it down.

Equality means nothing unless incorporated into the institutions.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Power, privilege, and violence are not, and never were, strictly Southern issues in America.

Although racism does, of course, occur in individual acts, these acts are part of a larger system that we all participate in. The focus on individual incidences prevents the analysis that is necessary in order to challenge this larger system.

We must all stand against both the continual, systematic, and structural racial inequities that normalize daily violence as well as against extreme acts of racial terror.

I am not a philosopher, only frustrated by the development of the world we live in - and too stupid to keep my mouth shut when I see injustice.

For generations, black children have been brought up to have a critical race consciousness, a framework for dealing with prejudice and discrimination, which helps inoculate them against the spiritual toxins they will almost certainly encounter as they come of age in our society.

Let's demonstrate, illustrate, the ways in which our communities are being undermined time and time again, and make sure that the broader public and those in power choose to stand with us.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It's the weight on our shoulders. That is what's actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism.

Sometimes we say we want an end to hate or racism or sexism. But we all participate in keeping these structures alive. If everyone decided to relinquish the past what would happen to people who feel that there hasn't been proper atonement made to them? And what happens to the person who feels that the constant atonement is their identity?

Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism or homophobia or policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you're not going to go anywhere with it if we don't focus on the concentration of power.

That happens to a lot of couples. I understand the black history in this country, and regret it, I wish it hadn't happened. See, I also know that it hasn't happened to African-Americans alive today. There isn't one African-American alive today who's treated as three-fifths of a person like it was in the past.

The American system itself is incapable. It is as incapable of producing freedom for the Afro-American as the system of a chicken is of producing a duck egg.

Now, what is the left's worldview in general? What is it? If you had to attach not a philosophy but an attitude to a leftist worldview, it's one of pessimism and darkness, sadness. They're never happy, are they? They're always angry about something. No matter what they get, they're always angry.

I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver. I'm asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.

I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.

When you're...stepping over a guy on the sidewalk...does it ever occur to you to think, 'Wow. Maybe our system doesn't work?'

I plan to stand by nonviolence, because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice, but also my dealings with people, and with my own self.

But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system.

Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing... then it will be done, but not until then.

We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

Don't let the actions of a few determine the way you feel about an entire group. Remember, not all German's were Nazis.