Angela Davis quotes

Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author, known for her involvement in civil rights and social justice movements. Her advocacy for prison reform and racial equality has made her an influential figure around the world. She continues to inspire with her lifelong commitment to fighting oppression and promoting human rights. Here are 104 of her quotes:

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Angela Davis

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

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

You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right now.

Angela Davis

I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.

Angela Davis

The prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards' unions, and legislative and court agendas.

Angela Davis

In the aftermath of the war, we find one of the most hidden eras of US history; and that is the period of radical reconstruction. It certainly remains the most radical era in the entire history of the United States of America. And this is an era that is rarely acknowledged in historical texts. ... There were progressive laws passed challenging male supremacy. This is an era that is rarely acknowledged. During that era of course we had the creation of what we now call historically black colleges and universities and there was economic development. This period didn't last very long. From the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, we might take 1865 as that day until 1877 when a radical reconstruction was overturned-and not only was it overturned but it was erased from the historical record-and so in the 1960s we confronted issues that should have been resolved in the 1860s. One hundred years later.

Angela Davis

I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

Angela Davis

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

Angela Davis

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.

Angela Davis

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Angela Davis

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

Angela Davis

Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery - did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.

Angela Davis

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

Angela Davis

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

Angela Davis

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

Angela Davis

And I guess what I would say is that we can't think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can't necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.

Angela Davis

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

Angela Davis

Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

Angela Davis

That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

Angela Davis

The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

Angela Davis

As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.

Angela Davis