Jerry Dammers Quotes

Some laws are wrong, and we have an obligation to speak out against those laws wherever they are.

Civil rights happened because youth got involved. The youth stood up and helped to break the pattern that their parents had got accustomed to living. The next generation has to take that stand for whatever it is, socially, that they are involved in.

If a policy is wrongheaded, feckless and corrupt, I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.

We believe that the world, too, can destroy apartheid, firstly by striking at the economy of South Africa.

I've been offered jobs by companies that supported apartheid many times in the 25 years of my modeling career, but I have never taken one of them. I have to refuse that money, because I'm not going to work against my people. They've suffered enough.

I engaged upon those activities because I believed that, in the dangerous circumstances which have been created in South Africa, it was my duty to do so.

Dissidents can't be dissidents forever; we are dissidents because we don't want to be dissidents.

History dictates that unresponsive governments force ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

It takes a lot of punishment to be able to do anything to change the social order.

Gandhi protested against restrictive policies. So did 'Guru.'

There has been no more principled opposition to racism than Jeremy Corbyn: he was getting arrested for protesting against Apartheid when the rest of them were doing deals and calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist.

As I grew older and got into the late teens and early 20s, I wanted to be a voice of the people. You know, getting locked up all the time and going through so much oppression and seeing it all around myself, I wanted to be a voice for it.

We have to speak truth to power.

Each of us should choose which course of action we must take; education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes, but let it not be said that we did nothing.

Democracy is not what we hate the most and what we fear the most. We need to stand up.

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.

Nelson Mandela was in jail when I was really young, and Winnie Mandela was one of the biggest faces of the movement. In South Africa we have a common phrase - it's like a chant in the street and at rallies: "Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo." Which means, "You strike a woman, you strike a rock."

People are hurting and angry, and they want something to be able to stand up and fight for. That's what I believe the antidote is to Trumpism.

Singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' all the places we've been, it takes on a different meaning everywhere. When you sing the line, 'How many years can a people exist, before they're allowed to be free?' in a prison yard for political prisoners in El Salvador; if you have sung it to a group of union organizers, who have all been in jail, in South Korea; if you've sung to Jews in the Soviet Union who have been refused exit visas; if you've sung it with Bishop Tutu protesting apartheid, the song breathes, it lives, it has a contemporary currency.

I am a revolutionary; my life is dedicated to freeing the people.

It was young people who stubbornly insisted on justice, stubbornly refused to accept the world as it is that transformed not just the country but transformed the world.

It's a misconception to believe that the resistance ended with the civil rights movement.

Young people are capable, when aroused, of bringing down the towers of oppression and raising the banners of freedom.

I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.

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