Angela Davis Quotes

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
― Angela Davis

“An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological work of questioning why "criminals" have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category "lawbreakers" is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us have broken the law at one time or another.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
― James Baldwin

“Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago.”
― James Baldwin

“Yes, I am a Communist. And I will not take the fifth amendment against self-incrimination, because my political beliefs do not incriminate me, they incriminate the Nixons, Agnews, and Reagans.”
― Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance

“When children attend schools that place a greater value in discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prisons.”
― Angela Davis

“I want to see all oppressed people throughout the world free. And the only way we can do this is by moving toward a revolutionary society where the needs and wishes of all people can be respected.' With these words the radical philosophy professor Angela Davis paraphrases Isaiah's ancient messianic dream of the lion that will peacefully lie down with the lamb in a completely good world. But what the Biblical prophet perhaps could not know is contained with a clarity that leaves nothing to be desired in the opening sentence of an address of the French Senate to Napoleon I: "Sire, the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can affect the human mind.”
― Paul Watzlawick, Münchhausen's Pigtail, or Psychotherapy & "Reality"

“les gens n'ont pas une mémoire aussi longue que les institutions, en particulier les institutions répressives.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Une lutte sans trêve

“The objective of the prosecution is not just to lynch Angela but to lynch her as a symbol of resistance.”
― Howard Moore, Jr

“People, especially young white people, in America and in Europe are aware of what's happening in the ghetto even if their fathers maintain an obstinate ignorance. All over Europe I've seen young people who've studied the methods of the Black Liberation movement, applying those same methods to the job of forcing a bit of humanity into their profit-crazed and economically teetering countries. Of course it's got its amusing sides too and very often one is forced to rush somewhere for a drink after he's seen a group of the blond German youths with hair frizzled and worn in Afros. The parents of these kids have all picked the portrait of the President of the United States as a symbol of what was good in America...But I've been in no part of Europe where there wasn't the picture of a good American--and it was always Angela Davis!”
― Oliver W. Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays

“¿Sabes que ese manzano fue plantado
con la tierra robada a los Rodilla-Herida
por el gobernador del estado?
¿Acaso tú conoces que su savia
se nutre con los huesos y pelos prisioneros
de San Quintín?

Did you know that apple tree was planted
on land stolen from Wounded Knee
by the governor of the state?
Perhaps you know how its sap
is nourished with the prisoner bones and hair
of San Quentin?

(de Un Manzano de Oakland, para Angela Davis)”
― Nancy Morejón, Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing: Selected Poetry

“Y a ti, viajero, te dará sombra siempre,
pero detén tu marcha pesarosa ante esa sombra suya.
No olvidarás jamás que ha sido
la triste, cruel, umbrosa, la efímera morada
de múltiples cabezas negras colgando entre el follaje,
incorruptibles.

And you, traveller, it will shade you always,
but slow your heavy step before its shadow.
Never will you forget this tree has been
of multitudinous black heads hanging among the foliage,
the sad, cruel, shadowy, the ephemeral dwelling
incorruptible.

(de Un Manzano de Oakland, para Angela Davis)”
― Nancy Morejón, Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing: Selected Poetry