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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

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Angela Davis
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: January 29
Autobiographer
Feminist
Human Rights Activist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Politician
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Angela Yvonne Davis
Angela Y. Davis
Time
Grew
Segregated
Cities
Oppose
Question
Status
Learning
Southern
United
Survival
Sense
Early
States
City
Country
Late

More quotes by Angela Davis

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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
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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
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We have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism.
Angela Davis
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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
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We are never assured of justice without a fight.
Angela Davis
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Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.
Angela Davis
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Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.
Angela Davis
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There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.
Angela Davis
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Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'
Angela Davis
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We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.
Angela Davis
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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
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Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­ selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.
Angela Davis
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The early feminist argument that violence against women is not inherently a private matter, but has been privatized by the sexist structures of the state, the economy, and the family has had a powerful impact on public consciousness.
Angela Davis
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First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.
Angela Davis
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I think we need to insist on a certain responsibility, which people have - particularly those who have made it into the ranks of the middle class because as [ Martin Luther] King said many years ago in a sense they have climbed out of the masses on the shoulders of their sisters and brothers and therefore, they do have some responsibility.
Angela Davis
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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
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I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.
Angela Davis
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in this society, dominated as it is by the profit-seeking ventures of monopoly corporations, health has been callously transformed into a commodity - a commodity that those with means are able to afford, but that is too often entirely beyond the reach of others.
Angela Davis
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When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.
Angela Davis
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It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals
Angela Davis