Periyar E. V. Ramasamy Quotes

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

Fight the power that be. Fight the power.

An oppressed people will always rise.

Something happened during the 1980s - perhaps the political climate of that time - that caused me to ask how a people would become part of a system that oppresses their own people.

The seed of revolution is repression.

I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Politics, like religion, hold up torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

It is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.

Knowing the horror that most women have of anything approaching irreverence, the Bible has been called out to play the part of a scarecrow on the rich fields of men’s monopolies…Men have had the management of all things human for six thousand years…Has the result been so eminently successful that we need dread a little change?

If we can't live in peace, then let's die in peace.… We didn't commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.

It is right to rebel against reactionaries.

We are not the ones who create revolutions. It is the imperialist system and its allies, internal allies, the ones who create revolution.

There never was a social change in America without angry people at the heart.

All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

I don't think the only place to fight for freedom is in the halls of Congress.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

If you compromise in any kind of movement or any kind of wave of revolution, if you sort of play the game, things are gonna change far more slowly than you need them to.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Let's face it: There are people who are extremists in every corner of society, and whatever flag they're waving is something Bad Religion has stood against.

A rebellion is not a revolution. It may ultimately lead to that end.

I'm 68 years old, and I'm as much a criminal now as I was at the age of 22. And, I'm even more of a dissident than I was then.

They think that, if we were just smart enough, we'd be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell 'em, and I do tell 'em, Oh, we're plenty smart, oh yeah - we know what's goin' on. And we don't like what's goin' on. And we're not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.