83 Activism Quotes To Inspire

In a world where voices yearning for justice and change often seem drowned out, the power of words can ignite movements and inspire individuals to take bold actions. Activism has always thrived on the passion and determination of those who aren't afraid to speak up and stand for what they believe in. Whether you're an activist yourself or someone seeking motivation to begin their journey, these carefully selected quotes encapsulate the essence of persistence, courage, and hope. Dive into our collection of the top 83 activism quotes, and let the wisdom and power of these words fuel your drive for change.

1. “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” - Elie Wiesel

2. “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.” - Elie Wiesel

3. “At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.We will be judged by "I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in.” - Mother Teresa

4. “I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.” - Malcolm X

5. “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” - Edward Abbey

6. “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” - E.B. White

7. “One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” - Kurt Vonnegut

8. “You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.” - Mahatma Gandhi

9. “War...is ugly and brutalizing, and the nobility is in doing it without becoming ugly and brutalizing.” - Dana Kramer-Rolls

10. “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.” - John Lennon

11. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,Nothing is going to get better. It's not.” - Dr. Seuss

12. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller

13. “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

14. “We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.” - M. T. Anderson

15. “Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.” - Bob Marley

16. “It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” - Samuel Adams

17. “It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” - Mahatma Gandhi

18. “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law” - Martin Luther King Jr.

19. “Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.” - Mahatma Gandhi

20. “Thou shalt not stand idly by” - Anonymous

21. “If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist.” - Jenny Holzer

22. “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” - Henry David Thoreau

23. “People would rather believe than know.” - Edward O. Wilson

24. “To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.” - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

25. “The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.” - Marcus Garvey

26. “No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.” - Barbara Ehrenreich

27. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass

28. “A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.” - Barack Obama

29. “The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.” - Kurt Cobain

30. “It is important for women to do something about what they see.” - Roma Tearne

31. “All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.” - Seyla Benhabib

32. “If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own.” - Wes Nisker

33. “The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.” - Michel Foucault

34. “Why do I always listen to your insane plans? Why aren't we at home watching TV like everyone else? What possible difference will any of this make?” - Shaun Tan

35. “‎God remains silent so that men and women may speak, protest, and struggle. God remains silent so that people may really become people. When God is silent and men and women cry, God cries in solidarity with them but doesn't intervene. God waits for the shouts of protest.” - Elsa Tamez

36. “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.” - Howard Zinn

37. “An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. ” - Anthony Standen

38. “It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.” - Aristotle

39. “There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning!” - Abbie Hoffman

40. “What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial...[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick.” - Betty Friedan

41. “[W]hat possible purpose does this lashing-out serve? Will activists be shamed into recovering their previous enthusiasm? Will Republicans stop their vicious attacks because Obama is lashing out to his left? It was pure self-indulgence; even if he feels aggrieved, he has to judge his words by their usefulness, not by his desire to vent. This isn't about him.” - Paul Krugman

42. “What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.” - Christopher Hitchens

43. “Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.” - Rebecca Solnit

44. “It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” - Leonardo da Vinci

45. “Most good things have already been said far too many times and just need to be lived.” - Shane Claiborne

46. “Where there is power, there is resistance.” - Michel Foucault

47. “You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not.” - Sri Ramakrishna

48. “Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself.” - Joss Whedon

49. “Say what you want but you NEVER say it with violence!” - Gerard Way

50. “As you get to thirty, the main thing is to not be sensible.” - Mark Steel

51. “As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.” - Vandana Shiva

52. “Never explain, never retract, never apologize. Just get the thing done and let them howl.” - Nellie McClung

53. “Think about it: virtually every atrocity in the history of humankind was enabled by a populace that turned away from a reality that seemed too painful to face, while virtually every revolution for peace and justice has been made possibly by a group of people who chose to bear witness and demanded that others bear witness as well.” - Melanie Joy

54. “Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.” - Ulrike Meinhof

55. “It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.” - Tariq Ali

56. “If a policy is wrongheaded feckless and corrupt I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.” - David Hackworth

57. “When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.” - Abraham Kuyper

58. “With all these occurrences of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom, then for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear to be the boundaries and smack against them like a heart against the rib cage. If we reveal boundaries in the course of our movements, then we will expose the inherent lie in the use of the word freedom. I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect. I don't know what's ahead of me in the course of my life and this civilization. I just don't feel I have reached the necessary things inside my history that would ease the pressure in my skull and in my future and in my present. It is exhausting, living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.” - David Wojnarowicz

59. “In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue.” - Edmund White

60. “The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.” - Malcolm X

61. “London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.” - Nick Cohen

62. “If the apostles reminded even Paul himself to remember the poor (Galatians 2:10), then surely the rest of us need such a reminder.” - Russell D. Moore

63. “You have to do to be.” - Eric Rofes

64. “A critical element in nearly all effective social movements is leadership. For it is through smart, persistent, and authoritative leaders that a movement generates the appropriate concepts and language that captures the frustration, anger, or fear of the group's members and places responsibility where it is warranted.” - David E. Wilkins

65. “Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. They wanted to act, to do something, to make life better for other people—and they have.” - Morgan Carroll

66. “Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation.Now, it's long been understood very well that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited: that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage-can. At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community-interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others; or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control.As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole and, by now, that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass-communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely, to impose necessary illusions, manipulate and deceive the stupid majority, and remove them from the public arena. The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.” - Noam Chomsky

67. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” - Frederick Douglass

68. “To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us vulnerable because it is so obviously about wanting something beyond what is, and to have a political desire often is construed as wanting too much.” - Deborah B. Gould

69. “I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn't be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.” - Malcolm X

70. “If Paul Revere had been a modern day citizen, he wouldn't have ridden down Main Street. He would have tweeted.” - Alec Ross

71. “When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.” - John May

72. “The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.” - Christopher Hitchens

73. “Strength of character comes from being hit by stray verbal stones, while protecting discarded ciphers in the snow.” - Shannon L. Alder

74. “Each of us lives with a sword over his head.There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.” - Murray Kempton

75. “And to those who would choose the safety of inaction over the danger of taking a stand, I have this to say:You bloody cowards. May you have the world that you deserve.” - Mira Grant

76. “The enormity of problems like hunger and social injustice can certainly motivate us to act. We can be convinced logically of the need for intervention and change. But it is the story of one individual that ultimately makes the difference—by offeringliving proof.” - John Capecci and Timothy Cage

77. “Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.” - Saul D. Alinsky

78. “This isn't about keeping mountains looking pretty. Ending mountaintop removal is about keeping humanity alive.” - Rivera Sun

79. “For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.” - Bhim Rao Ambedkar

80. “If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus’ gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.” - Philip Yancey

81. “What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot.” - Philip Yancey

82. “The world was in terrible shape, and I'm glad we stood up and said what we believed; but a lot of the time we'd say these beautiful things about justice and fairness and equality, but we weren't so nice to each other. We'd be jealous and we'd gossip, and we'd be moody and difficult and rude and inconsiderate. Why do I say 'we'? I mean I would be all that-- and if at the time I ever came near to knowing what I'd become, I'd dodge, I'd duck, I'd go on the offensive: the terrible Wall Street bankers. Lots of them were terrible-- and so were lots of us.” - Dorothy Day

83. “We cannot do everything, but we can all do something.” - Dillon Burroughs