Protest Quotes

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, "What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid?What would I do if my country was committing genocide?"

The answer is, you're doing it. Right now.”
― Aaron Bushnell

“I am so tired of waiting. Aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Wednesdays are for writers, and directors, and actors. Wednesdays are for creating art, and poetry, and poetry in motion. Wednesdays are for protest, and rebellion, and artivism. Wednesdays, are for words from my notebook.”
― N'Zuri Za Austin

“Most people die for stupid reasons. The most anyone can hope for is to make some noises before that happens.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night

“The signs gave a silent voice to the crowd: 'Welcome Home, Johnny D,' 'God Never Fails,' 'Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We Are Free at Last.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“डर एक हद तक ही डराता है। भय की सीमा-रेखा पार करने के बाद दबे-कुचले लोग, आंदोलनकारी बन जाते हैं।”
― Vandana Yadav, शुद्धि

“We were virtually attempting to square the circle.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It’s illegal, full stop, so there will always be a risk, I grant you. But if more women are standing up to the illegality, fighting against it… why not join them? Maybe there is safety in numbers, in a way. You told me they couldn’t arrest you all at the Hill protest. Not enough handcuffs, right?”

Evelyn takes another long draft from her glass, eyeing her irritatingly sensible husband. She nods again. “Not enough handcuffs.”
― Heather Marshall, Looking for Jane

“What I saw in Washington that October were a lot of Americans who were genuinely dismayed by what their country was doing in Vietnam; I also saw a lot of other Americans who were self-righteously attracted to a most childish notion of heroism--namely, their own. They thought that to force a confrontation with soldiers and policemen would not only elevate themselves to the status of heroes; this confrontation, they deluded themselves, would expose the corruption of the political and social system they loftily thought they opposed. These would be the same people who, in later years, would credit the antiwar "movement" with eventually getting the U.S. armed forces out of Vietnam. That was not what I saw. I saw that the righteousness of many of these demonstrators simply helped to harden the attitudes of those poor fools who *supported* the war. That is what makes what Ronald Reagan would say--two years later, in 1969--so ludicrous: that the Vietnam protests were "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." What I saw was that the protests did worse than that; they gave aid and comfort to the idiots who endorsed the war--they made that war last *longer*. That's what *I* saw. I took my missing finger home to New Hampshire, and let Hester get arrested in Washington by herself; she was not exactly alone--there were mass arrests that October.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“But the point of protest isn't winning;
It's holding fast to the promise of freedom,
Even when fast victory is not promised.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“The more you try to bury us, the firmer our roots. The more you try to silence us, the louder our song.”
― Phoenix Ning, Paragon Seven

“I was working towards my bachelor's degree in creative writing at Arizona State University when videos, pictures, and stories from these protests started blooming across my Facebook feed. I saw Native people holding their ground and being ground down by the opposing police force. I saw them bitten by dogs and hosed down and maimed by rubber bullets hitting their faces and bodies, all while bright white words scrolled across the bottom of the video, explaining the situation and giving statistics.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“8:01… FOOD FOR NONE!”
“8:02… FEED US, DUDE!”
“Five more minutes…”
“8:06… GET THE SWISH!”
“8:10… SWISH HIM AGAIN!”
“Oh, c’mon—”
― Georgia Dunn, Elvis Puffs Out: A Breaking Cat News Adventure

“Yes, silence can be an opinion," said Mishka. Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn’t be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.”
― Amor Towles, 2 Book Set ~ A Gentleman in Moscow & Rules of Civility

“The Dark Cloud
Is a protest on Capitol Hill that does not defend justice fully
Is a school policy that makes a bullying victim apologize to their bully
Is willing to take on anything because domination is its goal
Is ready to destroy your heart, mind, dreams, love, and soul”
― Aida Mandic

“When there is no process, people lose hope that their voices will be heard. And then they take action, even if there's no legal route to do so. But this action might not be the one they really want to take. Perhaps they want to have a community-wide conversation about a monument or make some changes to it. Understanding and reconciliation can happen in many ways - but when authorities refuse to listen to calls for removal, some people will think they have no choice but to topple a monument.”
― Erin L. Thompson, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments

“Literature is an act of resistance against dehumanization. War and trauma numb our senses and freeze our feelings. Literature restores us, awakens our feelings, and returns to us our sense of individuality and integrity.”
― Azar Nafisi

“Justice is not a distant idea or an abstract concept; it is something we must actively pursue, embody, and fight for every day”
― Sarah Jaffe

“Equating a pro-Palestinian stance to an anti-Semitic one is rendering the cause undignified by smearing it with an unjustifiable hatred for another. It is a cowardly way out of a real debate and a productive dialogue.”
― Aysha Taryam

“One must hesitate when calling these protests pro-Palestinian because in that labelling, we lose their truth. They are protests against senseless killings, they are a rejection of regimes that support occupation and a cry for an end to war as a pathway to peace. These protests are pro-humanity in its true sense of the word, an all-encompassing humanity that is not cherry-picked by the powers that be. They are protests against hypocrisy and for a right to life.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Non-violence wasn't a simply rejection of force. It was more a matter of opposing physical force with the force of the soul alone. Gandhi did not say: make no resistance when the blows rain down, when the brutality redoubles. He said almost the opposite: resist with your entire soul by standing up for as long as possible, never surrendering any of your dignity, and without showing the slightest aggression or doing anything at all that might restore, between the whipper and the whipped, any reciprocity or equivalence in a community of violence and hate. On the contrary, show immense compassion for the one who is beating you. The relation should remain asymmetric in every respect: on one side a blind, physical, hate-filled rage, on the other a spiritual force of love. If you hold firm, then the relationship is reversed; physical force degrades the one who uses it, who becomes a furious beast, while all human qualities are reflected in his prone victim, raised to a state of pure humanity by the attempt to lay him low. Non-violence puts violence to shame. To continue beating someone who opposes physical brutality with pure humanity, simply dignity, is to lose your honour and your soul there and then.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“And that is what rulers are afraid of: that a people will discover the sheer joy of being together, that they will rediscover their shared humanity through their power in numbers, and they will experience in their embracing of a cause the pleasure of solidarity and of acting in their common interest.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Lisa Fithian: The direct action element always brings the energy, attracts young people, but it is also the primary way in which we're building culture. Because all of these movements have to have culture the songs, the music, the visuals. Culture's life. And we're dealing with a culture of death in the U.S. We need to have an alternative. So, we were embodying a culture of life.
[As quoted by DW Gibson.]”
― DW Gibson, One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests

“A police officer is paid to be attacked by angry people.”
― Steven Magee

“To riot or not to riot, that is the question.”
― Steven Magee

“Beware those who have little left to lose." — From LOVE AND PROTEST, the story of the courtship of Senator Cole Nicole LeFavour and Carol Growhoski, and the good trouble of Idaho's Add the Words movement.”
― Cole Nicole LeFavour

“Activism requires an active audience. It’s easier to get someone standing to run than a human couch anchor to do anything.”
― Daniel Lawrence Abrams, Immortality Bytes: Digital Minds Don't Get Hungry

“If protest does not reach the people it claims to serve, then it is not protest – it is spectacle. And in the end, who does that serve?”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“A protest should be undeniable. It should not ask the oppressed to become scholars of your rhetoric. It should not demand a prerequisite reading list before it makes sense. A protest is not a lecture series; it is an eruption, a call, a demand. It is a truth so raw that even a passerby, even a child, even the most disengaged person in the crowd should be able to hear it and know, in their gut, what is being said.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“I stand for women.
I stand for men.
I stand for those the world ignores.
I stand for those who break yet rise again.
I stand for the disabled, the lost, the poor.
I stand for the outcast, the unheard, the unseen.
I stand for children, for their dreams and their light.
I stand for the elderly, their wisdom, their fight.
I stand for freedom, for truth, for choice.
I stand for every race, every culture, every voice.
I stand for the weary, the hopeless, the scarred.
I stand for equality, no matter how hard.
I stand for justice, I stand for love, I stand for peace.
I stand for you, I stand for me.

I stand, period.”
― N'Zuri Za Austin