To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.
— Noam Chomsky
There are some things in our world, there are some things in our nation to which I’m proud to be maladjusted, to which I call upon all men of goodwill to be maladjusted until the good society is realized. I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence
— Dr Martin Luther King Jnr
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. ... If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress
— Frederick Douglass
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread
— Anatole France
Greed and competition are not the result of immutable human temperament; greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the money we are using. We can produce more than enough food to feed everyone, and enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The job of the central banks is to create and maintain this scarcity, and the direct consequence of this is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive
— Bernard Lietaer
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it
— Abraham Lincoln
The actors for freedom are oppressed by the talkers and the verbal professors of freedom
— Wistanley
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing
— Thomas Jefferson
...if civilisation is to advance at all in the future, it must be through the help of women, women freed of their political shackles, women with full power to work their will in society. It was rapidly becoming clear to my mind that men regarded women as a servant class in the community, and that women were going to remain in the servant class until they lifted themselves out of it
— Emmeline Pankhurst
Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything
— George Bernard Shaw
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs
— Karl Marx
Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do
— Bertrand Russell
The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia; it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain
— Tony Benn
The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the world, unite