Leonard Peltier Quotes

There are people out there that feel there are injustices being made and happening in the USA on a daily basis.

[As a child] I was very interested in books that detailed injustice and how people who are underdogs were mistreated throughout history.

I cannot in good conscience participate in a celebratory occasion hosted by a country where people like myself are being systematically denied their basic right to live and love openly.

But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.

Minorities have never been given their rights. They have always had to wage a political and legal battle to win them.

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.

We need to realize that we should be on the side of any human being who is oppressed.

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.

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.

People are dying in vain because America isn't holding their end of the bargain up, as far as giving freedom and justice, liberty to everybody. That's something that's not happening.

That we suffer so much today under whatsoever flag we live is proof positive that constitutions and laws, when framed by the early advocates of human liberty, never included and were never intended for us as a people. It is only a question of sheer accident that we happen to be fellow citizens today with the descendants of those who, through their advocacy, laid the foundation for human rights.

For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

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!

Riot is the voice of the unheard.

I am aware that in presenting myself as an advocate for the Indians and their rights, I shall claim but little sympathy from the community at large, and that I shall stand very much alone....I feel it is my imperative to adhere to ... a principle enduring as life itself. That principle is to protect the Indian against wrong and oppression, and to vindicate him in the enjoyment of rights which have been solemnly guaranteed to him by this Government.

Where there are breaches of human rights, you need to speak out about it, no matter where it is.

As I grew older and got into the late teens and early 20s, I wanted to be a voice of the people. You know, getting locked up all the time and going through so much oppression and seeing it all around myself, I wanted to be a voice for it.

You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.

We've got to understand that all disenfranchised people have something in common...The pursuit of justice really is about equality for everyone.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

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 pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery.

America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?