Vetrimaaran Quotes

In the early 1980s, I burned my Social Security card at the New Orleans Investment Conference in protest of the state pension system.

Three Thousand Five Hundred unemployed twice a week [appear] in the [Glasgow] City Hall so that we may discuss principles and tactics applied to the present situation from a Marxian point of view.

I get a little belligerent when not enough protesters show up at my appearances.

[Betsy DeVos] is quite a smart person, capable, pretty sophisticated in subtle thought. And so to me, that puts her in the realm of policy. But we're in a climate where, as today, she tries to visit a school, and she can't even do that because protesters are blocking that.

People have to carry on with their lives, so only so much direct action can take place. Anti-nuclear activism may look dormant from appearances, but it’s there, like magma. It’s still brewing, and the next trigger might be another big protest or political change,

One has the impression that the young do not want to, or perhaps cannot, grow up. Our campuses have become dour, playless nurseries echoing with doctrinaire baby talk. You see six-foot babies clamoring for power and protesting against universities not having adequate arrangements for child care.

I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.

I'll never forget working to get my college, Wayne State University, to divest from the government in South Africa. This was the beginning of my activism, and the fight for social and economic justice has been a constant thread in my life.

I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.

Politics generally doesn't mix with sports very well.

Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.

Let the grassroots turn on the hate because that's the only thing that will make them do their duty.

Booker Washington was branded an accommodationist by many of the people who criticized him.

Obama and the Democrats are not focused on the moderates. They're focused on getting their base out, and they're trying to expand that base by forming sympathetic, empathetic alliances with the downtrodden, and there are a lot of downtrodden because Obama has made them that way via his policies.

I think there's a weapon of cynicism to say, 'Protest doesn't work. Organizing doesn't work. Y'all are a bunch of hippies. You know, it doesn't do anything,' because, frankly, it's said out of fear, because it is a potent force for political change.

At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for.

At some point in time, we're going to have to stop addressing the kneeling, and we're going to have to start addressing what led Colin Kaepernick to kneel. That's the issue that nobody wants to talk about.

I'm the national co-chair for the Women's March on Washington.

As a left-wing campaigner for 35 years, I've been arrested on picket lines, led anti-imperialist demonstrations and spoken at anti-deportation protests outside police stations. I've made speeches at street rallies, in prisons and universities and at pubs.

Chicago, I feel, is a microcosm for the segregated, violent environment that is America. I try to not only speak about these things in music, but also try to address these things in real life tangibly with action.

For generations of Hong Kongers, the only means of upward mobility and the only way to meaningfully contribute to society have been to obtain a respectable university degree (preferably in business administration) and a professional accreditation (in finance, accounting, law or medicine).

Everybody keeps saying what a lucky coincidence that 'Newsies' is happening when it is, with things like Occupy Wall Street.

I grew up around politics. I organized my first campaign when I was 14, a walk-out in my high school to protest the year-round school schedule.

You wanna boycott me, that's fine, but I'm not changing my advertising.

The pickets were just a fact of life. And the fact that people hated us from the time I was tiny, the fact that we were hated, I was taught, was a cause for great rejoicing.