Cesar Chavez Quotes

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. Cesar Chavez Address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Nov. 9, 1984

Freedom can occur only through education.

The process of spotting fear and refusing to obey it is the source of all true empowerment.

Movements begin when oppressed people make - and keep remaking - a deeply inward decision to stop consenting to external demands that contradict a critical inner truth, the truth that they are worthy of respect.

Only the educated are free.

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.

If our people are to fight their way up out of bondage we must arm them with the sword and the shield and the buckler of pride.

Except in Haiti, nowhere in the world have we resisted you. We have suffered, we have grown dull and like cattle under a whip, obeyed. Why? Because, m'sieu, we have no pride! And we have no pride because we have nothing to remember.... While I live I shall try to build that pride we need, and build it in terms white men as well as black can understand. I am thinking of the future, m'sieu, not of now. I will teach pride if my teaching breaks every back in my kingdom.

Fear is the first obstacle we have to get over in our battle for freedom

When you've got education, you've got knowledge and power and confidence to go out in the world.

You can't build a revolution with no education. Jomo Kenyatta did this in Africa, and because the people were not educated, he became as much an oppressor as the people he overthrew.

Freedom and confidence are two different things, in my book. Confidence is overrated - it can be faked, whereas freedom is fearlessness.

Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.

A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.

Fear is the greatest form of oppression. The best way to rise up in protest is to live your life to its fullest!

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity.

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Education is freedom.

No-one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you.

Working on my knowledge and education and learning how to become a more talented and wise person make me feel more sexy.

Hope is for people who wait. And I don't want to wait no more. I'm not scared anymore. I'm not scared of myself. Of my things. Of my fear. Of absolutely nothing. And that's music.

I don't walk around with fear. I walk around with strength. I believe in cause and effect.

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

I always love it when I hear back from kids who say they discovered Percy Jackson and now wear their learning difference as a badge of honour.