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
Radical simply means grasping things at the root.
– Angela Davis
Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
– Angela Davis
The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.
– Angela Davis
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
– Angela Davis
We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.
– Angela Davis
What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.
– 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
Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.
– 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
Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.
– 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
My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.
– 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 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
I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.
– Angela Davis
I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.
– 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
As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.