Social Innovators: Revolutionaries & Radicals

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
-John Adams


"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher."
-Ambrose Bierce


"Men are not admitted into Heaven because they have curbed or governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of Heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so holy."
-William Blake


"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."
-John Brown


"I maintain my right to die as I have lived - a free woman, not cowed into silence by any other human being."
-Ida Craddock


"Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal."
-Charles Darwin


"People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent."
-Bob Dylan


"A civilization which leaves so much of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence."
-Sigmund Freud


"Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man."
-Mohandas Gandhi


"A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."
-Marcus Garvey


"Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms."
-Che Guevara


"Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them."
-Abbie Hoffman


"An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
-Martin Luther King, Jr


"The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform."
-Alfred Kinsey


"All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man."
-Jiddu Krishnamurti


"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-John Lennon


"After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended."
-Nelson Mandela


"Me, I'm no educated man. If I was educated, I'd be a damn fool."
-Bob Marley


"As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality."
-Karl Marx


"If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door."
-Harvey Milk


"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
-George Orwell


"I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy."
-Thomas Paine


"Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises."
-Margaret Sanger


"A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives."
-Albert Schweitzer


"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph."
-Haile Selassie I


"However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family."
-Gloria Steinem


"You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom."
-Malcolm X


"It is better to die on your feet, than live on your knees."
-Emiliano Zapata