73+ Angela Davis Quotes On Education, Change And Community

Angela Davis is an American political activist, academic, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA and had close relations with the Black Panther Party. She is known for her work on various social justice issues, including the prison-industrial complex, racism, and sexism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Angela Davis on education, leadership, change.

Top 10 Angela Davis Quotes

1. We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
2. I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.
3. When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.
4. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
5. Walls turned sideways are bridges.
6. Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.
7. I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.
8. Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
9. Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.
10. It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.

Angela Davis Short Quotes

• It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals
• Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.
• You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.
• Progressive art can assist people to learn what's at work in the society in which they live.
• Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.
• We have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism.
• A fair trial would have been no trial at all.
• When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.
• We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.
• We are never assured of justice without a fight.

Angela Davis Quotes About Community

I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together. — Angela Davis

I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing. — Angela Davis

We can't talk about the black community. It's no longer a homogeneous community; it was never a homogeneous community. — Angela Davis

I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence. — Angela Davis

Angela Davis Famous Quotes And Sayings

I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both. — Angela Davis

I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us. — Angela Davis

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

When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa. — Angela Davis

There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice. — Angela Davis

Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society. — Angela Davis

I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to. — Angela Davis

we have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance. — Angela Davis

We cannot assume that people by virtue of the fact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressive political struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies that assume that black unity black political unity is possible. — Angela Davis

But at the same time you can't assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life — Angela Davis

Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework. — Angela Davis

There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice. — Angela Davis

Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was - 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within - internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing. — Angela Davis

Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­ selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment. — Angela Davis

Obviously there are some organizations that go out on the street and say we want an end to the capitalist system. But obviously that is not going to happen as a result of just assuming that stance. — Angela Davis

Kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something. — Angela Davis

As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners. — Angela Davis

I don't think it's necessary to feel guilty. Because I know that I'm still doing the work that is going to help more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system, and I'm trying to use whatever knowledge I was able to acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move us forward. — Angela Davis

I'm thinking about some developments say in the 80s when the anti-apartheid movement began to claim more support and strength within the US. Black trade unionists played a really important role in developing this US anti-apartheid movement. — Angela Davis

We have to look at for example the increasing globalization of capital, the whole system of transitional capitalism now which has had an impact on black populations - that has for example eradicated large numbers of jobs that black people traditionally have been able to count upon and created communities where the tax base is lost now as a result of corporations moving to the third world in order to discover cheap labor. — Angela Davis

Racism cannot be separated from capitalism. — Angela Davis

The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex challenges to the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its presence that they could not con­ceive of society without it. Within the history of the United States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind. — Angela Davis

I think it’s the right moment to talk about it because it is part of a revolutionary perspective - how can we not only discover more compassionate relations with human beings but how can we develop compassionate relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet and that would mean challenging the whole capitalist industrial form of food production. — Angela Davis

I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world. — Angela Davis

in this society, dominated as it is by the profit-seeking ventures of monopoly corporations, health has been callously transformed into a commodity - a commodity that those with means are able to afford, but that is too often entirely beyond the reach of others. — Angela Davis

I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital. — Angela Davis

I think we need to insist on a certain responsibility, which people have - particularly those who have made it into the ranks of the middle class because as [ Martin Luther] King said many years ago in a sense they have climbed out of the masses on the shoulders of their sisters and brothers and therefore, they do have some responsibility. — Angela Davis

We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was. — Angela Davis

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb. — Angela Davis

Not only the brothers on the street but the middle class brothers are also identifying with the gangster rappers because of the extent to which this music circulates. It becomes possible for the - not only the young middle class men, but it becomes possible for young middle class white men and young men of other racial communities to identify with the misogyny of gangster rap. — Angela Davis

I can't really blame a lot of young sisters and brothers who believe that education has anything to offer them. Because as a matter of fact, it has nothing to offer them. Suppose they do get a high school diploma that is meaningful. What kind of job is awaiting them. The jobs that used to be available to working class people are not there as a result of the de-industrialization of this economy. — Angela Davis

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general. — Angela Davis

Often young black people are looking towards the alternative economies. They are looking towards the drug economy.... the economies that are going to that apparently will produce some kind of material gain for them. — Angela Davis

Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice. — Angela Davis

We must always attempt to lift as we climb — Angela Davis

Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do. — Angela Davis

It doesn't surprise me that aspect of the black nationalist movement, the cultural side, has triumphed because that is the aspect of the movement that was most commodifiable and when we look at the commodification of blackness we're looking at a phenomenon that's very profitable and it's connection with the rise of a black middle class I think is very obvious. — Angela Davis

No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step. — Angela Davis

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve consciousness of capitalism (I mean the feminism that I relate to, and there are multiple feminisms, right). So it has to involve a consciousness of capitalism and racism and colonialism and post-colonialities, and ability and more genders than we can even imagine and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name. — Angela Davis

It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it's not going to solve the problems — Angela Davis

I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers. — Angela Davis

I don't know whether the movement crashed as a result of the overwhelming character of the institutions we set out to change. I think repression had a lot to do with the dismantling of the movement and also the winning of certain victories had something to do with the inability of the movement to take those victories as the launching point for new goals and developing new strategies. — Angela Davis

I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way. — Angela Davis

If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night. — Angela Davis

I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March. — Angela Davis

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve? — Angela Davis

It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement. — Angela Davis

Radical simply means "grasping things at the root." — Angela Davis

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time. — Angela Davis

Life Lessons by Angela Davis

1. Angela Davis has taught us that we must never give up on our fight for justice and equality, no matter how difficult the struggle may be.
2. Through her activism, she has shown us that we must always strive to use our voices to stand up for what is right and to challenge oppressive systems of power.
3. She has also demonstrated the importance of collaboration and collective action in creating meaningful social change.