Gordon Parks Quotes

The camera could be a very powerful instrument against discrimination, against poverty, against racism.

There's still injustice happening in my world. I sing my songs at concerts and I'm so grateful that the people are ready to hear them.

I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil - along with the evil of racism - with a camera.

We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things.

This is Not Another Revolution. This is a Civil Rights Movement

Oxfam is part of a global movement for social justice. We mainly work to fight for economic and social rights for people without a voice or people who are oppressed.

Rights are won only by those who make their voices heard.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress....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.

it is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks.

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

I've always asked to be able to speak and write about injustice and to do it in a way that would encourage people to make things better for everyone.

Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle....goa ts are used for sacrificial offerings and not lions.

I don't need no peace. I need equal rights and justice.

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

All over this world people are standing up for freedom.

I'm not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody's boot on my neck.

There's no question in my mind but that rights are never won unless people are willing to fight for them.

I'm going to fight for human rights, whether I do it silently behind the scenes or vocally so that I get locked up. I can't just sit back; it's not in my nature. I can't sit back and blindly ignore it, and I won't.

In less than a century we experienced great movement. The youth movement! The labor movement! The civil rights movement! The peace movement! The solidarity movement! The women's movement! The disability movement! The disarmament movement! The gay rights movement! The environmental movement! Movement! Transformation! Is there any reason to believe we are done?

Where I come from, if you see your family and friends' civil rights being taken away, you speak up and do everything you can to keep that from happening!

No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others.

I want to be the voice and the vision for the poor and the powerless.

Rights are to be taken, not requested; seized, not begged for.

Wherever there was injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion.

The protestor I think will speak up for the world's poorest.