Social Justice Quotes

Let's make progress justice a process, not an afterthought

~ Simon S. Tam

We hear things like “we elected a black president,” as if that event was the magic eraser to wipe away all of the racial problems in our country in one fell swoop.But that would be like saying that in 1932, we elected a president with a physical disability, so we should stop building ramps and having reserved handicap spaces because that’s reverse discrimination against the able-bodied

~ Simon S. Tam

Justice is to social justice like a chair to an electric chair.

~ Janusz Korwin-Mikke

We need to let ourselves be evangelized by the poor. They have much to teach us.

~ Pope Francis

You don't have to be a billionaire to believe you can make a difference. Give your resources to a charity and volunteer in your community.

~ Germany Kent

Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.

~ Ha-Joon Chang

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.

~ Max Stirner

What we can see in most societies is the gravity of suffering, tears of sorrow and nightmares of hopelessness.

~ Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Earth was singing her revolution. She was calling her brave men and women to her defense.

~ Rivera Sun

For the Church, the option for the poor is primarily a theological category rather than a cultural, sociological, political, or philosophical one. God shows the poor his first mercy. This divine preference has consequences for the faith life of all Christians, because we are called to have this mind...which was in Jesus Christ (Phil. 2:5). Inspired by this, the Church has made an option for the poor, which is understood as a special form of primacy in the exercise of Christian charity, to which the whole tradition of the Church bears witness. This option - as Benedict XVI has taught - is implicit in our Christian faith in a God who became poor for us, so as to enrich us with his poverty. This is why I want a Church that is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the center of the Church's pilgrim way. We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them, and to embrace the mysterious wisdom that God wishes to share with us through them.

~ Pope Francis

We cannot become starched Christians, those overeducated Christians who speak of theological matters as they calmly sip their tea. No! We must become courageous Christians and go in search of the people who are the very flesh of Christ! ... This is the [issue]: the flesh of Christ, touching the flesh of Christ, taking upon ourselves this suffering for the poor.

~ Pope Francis

A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of Godthat does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in whichit is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?

~ Oscar A. Romero

To consume the best for yourself and give the crumbs to God is blasphemy. A heart that truly worships is a heart that gives its best to God in time and substance. A heart that truly worships God gives generously to the causes of God---causes that God cares deeply about. I have to wonder whether someday we may wake up to discover that all our incestous spending on ourselves and our frantic construction of excessively luxurious places of worship---even as we ignore, for the most part, the hurting and the deprived of the world---filled God's heart with pain.

~ Ravi Zacharias

Each of us is called upon to take a stand. So in these days ahead, as we examine ourselves and each other, our works, our fears, our differences, our sisterhood and survivals, I urge you to tackle what is most difficult for us all, self-scrutiny of our complacencies, the idea that since each of us believes she is on the side of right, she need not examine her position.

~ Audre Lorde

Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood.

~ Dimitri A. Bogazianos

How do the day’s event(s) compare with the famous quote you’ve picked to write about in So This Just Happened: The Journal for USA Current Events?Journal your thoughts on current events inside, in light of the 101 famous and thought-provoking quotes about the United States of America, democracy and more.Abnormal times call for first person accounts: witness current events compared to the United States of America’s values, laws, and principles. So This Just Happened: The Journal for USA Current Events includes 101 thought-provoking and insightful quotes by Founding Fathers’, famous historical figures, past Presidents and more for you to compare and contrast with current events.With a quote on every other lined journal page; you can write in order or flip to the most relevant quote for the day’s events to write about. Each lined page for you to write on has a spot to write the date at the top.

~ Samuel B. Jonathan

But now what? Why, now comes my master, takes me right away from my work, and my friends, and all I like, and grinds me down into the very dirt! And why? Because, he says, I forgot who I was; he says, to teach me that I am only a nigger! After all, and last of all, he comes between me and my wife, and says I shall give her up, and live with another woman. And all this your laws give him power to do, in spite of God or man. Mr. Wilson, look at it! There isn't one of all these things, that have broken the hearts of my mother and my sister, and my wife and myself, but your laws allow, and give every man power to do, in Kentucky, and none can say to him nay! Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I haven't any country, anymore than I have any father. But I'm going to have one. I don't want anything of your country, except to be let alone,--to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I'll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.

~ Ashton Applewhite

I want it said loudly and clearly that we can define racism in many ways, but it is, in my opinion, intellectually disingenuous to define it in a way that trivializes the role that racial hatred plays. Certainly, not all racism is hate-driven, but to ignore the connection between racial hate and racism is to reduce the concept of racism to a useless theoretical abstraction.

~ David Pilgrim

Why does a government agency that has no connection with my community have the right to dictate what is appropriate for it?

~ Simon S. Tam

Racism doesn't have to fit our stereotypes for what it is in order for it to hurt - but it also means that tools for dismantling the system don't have it fit our stereotype either.

~ Simon S. Tam

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.

~ Gustavo Gutiérrez

As she climbed down from the stage, I thought: This is what courage is. It's not just living through the nightmare, it's doing something with it afterward. It's being brave enough to talk about it to other people. It's trying to organize to change things.

~ Leslie Feinberg

Had I glimpsed just a little of the suffering I would witness and the heartbreak I would endure, I would have fled in the other direction...But I could not foresee any of these things...And many years later, with tears in my eyes, I remembered my decision to follow this God no matter what the cost.

~ Daniel Walker

Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations.

~ Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Ronald Reagan goes around saying that Nicaragua is communist and that communism is a threat to Central America. Why doesn't he say that he's a big capitalist, and that capitalism has made a great mess of Central America? Why doesn't he talk about what capitalism has done? We don't know what communism is, but we sure know what capitalism has done for us!

~ Elvia Alvarado

In order to break free from the chains that bind, one must take whatever action they can to disconnect internally from the larger systems of oppression, of which the family unit is merely a microcosm.

~ Sil Lai Abrams

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.

~ Audre Lorde

Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence?

~ Paolo Freire

The role of an activist is not to lead the masses with a flag draped around his or her shoulders. Activists meet a few people at a time in a coffee shop to explain in hushed tones why they should believe when no one else does. An activist’s moment is not the moment of change, it is the period when change seems impossible.

~ Ahmed Salah

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

~ Terry Eagleton

Equality is humanity.

~ Rashmit Kalra

A church that is committed to Christian Community Development sees not only the soul of a person as significant but also his or her whole life on Earth. It is being completely pro-life for a person, not only eternally, but also as the person lives on this earth. Therefore, Christian Community Development sees that the Church must be involved in every aspect of a person's life. In order to accomplish the wholistic aspect of ministry, pastors and leaders must be networkers. Christian Community Development builds coalitions in communities so that they can work together to solve the problems.

~ Robert Lupton

Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.

~ Ha-Joon Chang

It is, perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages daily he would not save it against old age, nor be much better for it in the interim.

~ Thomas Paine

America: It's a free country, that is if you can afford it.

~ Rythmic Karma

The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue!

~ Patrick W. Corrigan

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God grante

~ Voltaire