Sports Activism Quotes

The days of a tennis champion as a gender rights leader are over.

Arthur Ashe had been the first black athlete to play Johannesburg at the time of apartheid.

Why, when an athlete says something, why is it downplayed or considered not OK? I've always challenged that notion.

I feel like the NBA, WNBA, tennis and basketball have really been at the forefront of social justice and pushing for change from the athlete platform.

In the seventies we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes. We had to make it okay for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports.

I'm able to give a voice to the athletes around the world - use my degree for something other than the power play.

You want to get something changed, you send sport. Look what happened when Pee Wee Reese puts his arm around Jackie Robinson. That did more for racial relations in the United States through sport.

As a female athlete, I think it's really important to stand up on a podium and represent females and what we're capable of, and I always try to make political statements with what I do rather than with headlines.

Jackie Robinson, as an athlete and as someone who was trying to make a stand for equality, he was exemplary.

In 1981, I spoke at the Olympic Congress. I was scandalised that I was the first athlete to be given that chance. But I made the most of it.

Sometimes women's soccer can be political.

As footballers we have a massive platform that we should be using way more than we actually are.

Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.

Athletes are in a position where others think they shouldn't weigh in on certain social topics.

I wanted to use sports for social change.

When I started playing professionally, it made me realize that I had a voice in the league, one that gave me the chance to share a different side of our day-to-day life and the things that were happening on and off the court.

Recently, more athletes have been speaking up on political issues, a change from the old days when the only political issue that mattered to 99 percent of them was which candidate was most likely to lower their taxes.

I'm in the perfect position. It's a sports position and a political position where I can help better the lives of athletes around the world.

I applaud the professional athletes using their platform to voice their opinions.

I was certainly a kid who believed he could make a difference in the world. I was, as a young person, cooking up plans. My hero is Billie Jean King, and the thing that I find so impressive about Billie Jean is that she took something as banal as playing tennis and used it to change the world. She really did.

I want to be remembered as someone that used football to raise awareness.