Cherrie Moraga Quotes

When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.

The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.

I think that people who make films and think they're changing the world are sorely mistaken. If that really is your goal, there are far better ways to do it. I'm making politically observant films for audiences.

The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.

To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul.

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I'm trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

I think it's important, if you are an artist, to use your music to stand up for what you believe in.

I love TV, I love writing, but I love movements more.

I believe that the power of literature is stronger than the power of tyranny.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

A political movement is that in which the proletarians as a class exert pressure against the ruling classes.

There is nobody on this planet who was ever liberated by an athlete or an entertainer.

I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine.

We use celebrity to the advantage of everything. Why not to the advantage of those who need to be liberated? My job was to convince the icons in the arts that they needed to have a presence in Washington on that day.

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

The black artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.

Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity.

Kendrick Lamar represents Compton's evolution, embodying the New Vision for Compton - Purpose, Prosperity, and Progress.

I think we sometimes forget that we have so many other places to create change. My dad taught me this, but the political is one spot to make change. But so is writing a book.

The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms.

I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He singled-handedly revolutionized the political, artistic, and historical discourses about America.

Hollywood has a long, storied and often problematic history of political protest movements.

There's this moment happening in our culture where the power of the audience and the influence that people of color have is undeniable at this point.

I can't just sit back and write about the club when our democracy is under attack. I have to be a more positive force.

I have spent the last 30 years forming the religious right. I write a letter every week and send a newspaper every month to 200,000 pastors who are broadly called evangelicals, bringing them up to date on what is happening in Washington, in the state capitals, in the culture, and what we need to do about it. And of course I'm criticized for it, and of course I have calculated the positives and the negatives, but I have long been at peace with what I do.