Passionate about equality and racial justice, she was actively involved in the civil rights and feminist movements, and she is also a strong advocate for the LGBTQ community. These Angela Davis quotes tell the fascinating story of a true trailblazer.
Born in 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis is an American academic, activist and author. She studied French Literature at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, in West Germany. A scholar and a revolutionary, Davis embraced Marxist ideas and became involved in black politics. A longtime member of the American Communist Party, she published a number of books on feminism, equality and the American prison system. In recognition of her political activism she garnered numerous awards and accolades, including the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize.
Angela Davis became an international symbol of resistance, when she was charged for complicity in the “Soledad Brothers” murder case, and was held in jail for 18 months before getting acquitted of all charges. Her incarceration ignited an international “Free Angela” movement which also inspired artists and musicians like John Lennon, who wrote for her the song “Angela”, and the Rolling Stones who dedicated to her their song “Sweet Black Angel”.
A radical activist, Davis had a profound influence in the American political scene. After almost fifty years, she still remains fervent and zealous, participating in numerous international forums and lecture tours, speaking about the need for prison and criminal justice reform, women’s rights, racial inequality and the inequality of capitalism.
As a tribute to this iconic woman and role model, here we have curated for you her most inspirational quotes. Share them with friends and loved ones in order to motivate them! Use them as captions to pair perfectly with your Instagram and social media posts! Reflect upon them to gain insight and transform your perspective of the world!
Table of Contents
- Powerful Angela Davis Quotes To Inspire and Motivate You
- Short Empowering Angela Davis Quotes
- Angela Davis Quotes About Racism
- Feminism Quotes by Angela Davis
- Quotes by Angela Davis On Society and Freedom
Powerful Angela Davis Quotes To Inspire and Motivate You
Revolution is an act of perception and as such it starts from within, it begins with ourselves. It is a vision of hope and optimism that starts with planting a seed in a fertile mind!
- I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.Angela Y. Davis
- You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.Angela Y. Davis
- If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.Angela Y. Davis
- Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible. Angela Y. 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 Y. Davis
- I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect. Angela Y. Davis
- I would say that as our struggles mature, they produce new ideas, new issues, and new terrains on which we engage in the quest for freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom. Angela Y. Davis
- I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities. Angela Y. Davis
- Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible. Angela Y. Davis
- It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it’s important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement. Angela Y. Davis
- Movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements. Angela Y. Davis
- White antislavery abolitionists such as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in the dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics. Angela Y. Davis
- It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle. Angela Y. Davis
Short Empowering Angela Davis Quotes
A list of short but powerful, thought evoking quotes that will widen your perspective and also make perfect captions for your Instagram and social media posts!
- Radical simply means “grasping things at the root”.Angela Y. Davis
- We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.Angela Y. Davis
- It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism. Angela Y. Davis
- What this country needs is more unemployed politicians. Angela Y. Davis
- We should seek out all the doors which still remain ajar, however slight the opening might be. Angela Y. Davis
- To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women. Angela Davis
- Communities are always political projects, political projects that can never solely rely on identity. Angela Y. Davis
- Black history is indeed American history, but it is also world history. Angela Y. Davis
- Local issues have global ramifications. Angela Y. Davis
- Racism cannot be separated from capitalism. Angela Y. Davis
Angela Davis Quotes About Racism
The problem of racism is the problem of a “closed” mind, a mind ruled by fear and ignorance. We are much more alike than different!
- In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist. Angela Y. Davis
- If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions. Angela Y. Davis
- Woman” was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage. As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage. Angela Y. Davis
- No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism. Angela Y. Davis
- Of course, there’s a grave collective psychic damage that is a consequence of not being acknowledged within the context of one’s ancestry. Those of us of African descent in the US of my age are familiar with that sense of not being able to trace our ancestry beyond, as in my case, one grandmother. Angela Y. Davis
- Despite the importance of anti racist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system. Angela Y. Davis
- For most of our history the very category “human” has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male. Angela Y. Davis
Feminism Quotes by Angela Davis
When you empower women, you empower the world and this can only mean that great things are about to happen, because women are made of magic and the seed of creation lies within them!
- Deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Angela Y. Davis
- When Black women stand up— as they did during the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as they did during the Black liberation era, earth-shaking changes occur. Angela Y. Davis
- We must begin to create a revolutionary, multiracial women’s movement that seriously addresses the main issues affecting poor and working-class women. Angela Y. Davis
- Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together. Angela Y. Davis
- No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step. Angela Y. Davis
Quotes by Angela Davis On Society and Freedom
Freedom is the cornerstone of society, a society of equality and justice where everyone has absolute liberty to express himself. However, freedom is never free. It requires struggles and sacrifices and has a high price tag, which is almost always paid in blood!
- The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve? Angela Y. Davis
- We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.Angela Y. Davis
- Democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory. Angela Y. Davis
- Prison relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism. Angela Y. Davis
- Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. Angela Y. Davis
- It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle. Angela Y. Davis
- Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.Angela Y. Davis
- I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us. Angela Y. Davis
- Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners. Angela Y. Davis
- Anyway I don’t think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do. Angela Y. Davis
- The roots of sexism and hom*ophobia are found in the same economic and political institutions that serve as the foundation of racism in this country and, more often than not, the same extremist circles that inflict violence on people of color are responsible for the eruptions of violence inspired by sexist and hom*ophobic biases. Our political activism must clearly manifest our understanding of these connections. Angela Y. Davis
- I try never to take myself for granted as somebody who should be out there speaking. Rather, I’m doing it only because I feel there’s something important that needs to be conveyed. Angela Davis
If you like it, pin it!
You May Also Like:
Write the Book You Want to Read | 104 Toni Morrison Quotes
The Demand for Equality Through 150 James Baldwin Quotes
The Bus Seat Story | 52 Rosa Parks Quotes
