Giuseppe Mazzini Quotes

It was imperative to make common cause with the oppressed in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors.

Much depends upon us for the help of our color—more than many are aware. If we are lazy and idle, the enemies of freedom plead it as a cause why we ought not to be free … by such conduct we strengthen the hands of oppression and keep many in bondage …. I entreat you to consider the obligations we lie under ….

I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression. My address is like my shoes; it travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

Fellow Peasants: No hand will after this day be above your hand… You are the producers. Yours is the power.

The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

The hope of remaking the world is indispensable in the struggle of oppressed men and women.

We're not trying to take power away or rule anybody - we're just trying to get up from under the rulers.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard?

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive…. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world, I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebrations. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough to be that-which is the foundation of activism.

The great appear great to us only because we are on our knees;, LET US RISE!

We will take up the ball of the Revolution where our fathers stopped it and roll it to the final consummation of freedom and independence for the masses.

Disobey the rules; ask for more; leave your wretchedness behind; organize with your brothers and sisters; never accept the hand of fate.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.

Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stand up and protest.

Socialism appeals to Jews because it embraces the interests of the oppressed.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.

To the workman we appeal by the memory and traditions of his own sufferings and wrongs to be vigilant to avoid the great guilt of inflicting upon his fellow-citizens the injustice from which he has himself escaped.

It is the moral force which carries a movement forward.

Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.

It takes a lot of punishment to be able to do anything to change the social order.

I was functioning in a time when people were struggling, and they knew they had to struggle, and I was a part of that struggle. It wasn't just women.

I know we have to have people of good conscience who stand up against oppression. I know we have to have people who understand that social justice belongs to us all. And that wakes me up every morning, and that makes me fight even harder.