Movement Quotes

The history of the movement reveals that Negro-white alliances have played a powerfully constructive role, especially in recent years. While Negro initiative, courage and imagination precipitated the Birmingham and Selma confrontations and revealed the harrowing injustice of segregated life, the organized strength of Negroes alone would have been insufficient to move Congress and the administration without the weight of the aroused conscience of white America.

The children understood the stakes they were fighting for. I think of one teenage boy whose father's devotion to the movement turned sour when he learned that his son had pledged himself to become a demonstrator. The father forbade his son to participate. "Daddy," the boy said, "I don't want to disobey you, but I have made my pledge. If you try to keep me home, I will sneak off. If you think I deserve to be punished for that, I'll just have to take the punishment. For, you see, I'm not doing this only because I want to be free. I'm doing it also because I want freedom for you and Mama, and I want it to come before you die." That father thought again, and gave his son his blessing.

Unfortunately, when hope diminishes, the hate is often turned most bitterly toward those who originally built up the hope. In all the speaking that I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites, the only time that I have been booed was one night in a Chicago mass meeting by some young members of the Black Power movement.

As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love.

All great movements, every vigorous impulse that a community may feel, become perverted and distorted as time passes.

This movement among the Jews is not new... This world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing... It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century.

What is the true and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule? It is the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man ... the Kaffir is to be declared the brother of the European, to be constituted his legal equal, to be armed with political rights.

Hip-Hop isn't just music, it is also a spiritual movement of the blacks! You can't just call Hip-Hop a trend!

An awful lot of gay pop stars pretend to be straight. I'm going to start a movement of straight pop stars pretending to be gay.

Systemic racism can have an ending. Police brutality can have an ending. Economic repression of Black and brown people can have an ending... A movement without action is a movement standing still. To those who say they care: Move more than your mouth. Move your feet to the polls, and use your hands to vote... Black lives do matter. And this is not another digital, viral trend, moment or hashtag, Yes, all lives do matter, but they only matter when black lives matter too.

Misogyny is ingrained in people from the time they are born. So to me, feminism is probably the most important movement that you could embrace, because it's just basically another word for equality.

In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You are either for the labor movement or for the capitalist movement. Either you become a right-wing Archie Bunker if you are in the class I am in, or you become an instinctive socialist, which I was.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Every good movement passes through five stages, indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression, and respect.

In the mountain, stillness surges up to explore its own height. In the lake, movement stands still to contemplate its own depth.

The man and the movement seemed 'reactionary' in my eyes.

I know that fewer people are won over by the written word than by the spoken word and that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.