1 “Once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.”
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner
2 “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
Maya Angelou
3 “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
James Baldwin
4 “Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind—even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants.”
Maggie Kuhn, 1972
5 “As long as you are convinced that you have never done anything, you can never do anything.”
Malcolm X
6 “Never doubt that a small group of thoughful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead
7 “When I am with the GOPs, I’d rather die than be one. But I feel the same way when I’m with the Democrats, so I think I’ll go into a convent.”
Abby Scott Baker, National Women’s Party organizer, 1916
8 “Life is a hard battle anyway, and if we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight for freedom, it makes it all go easier.”
Sojourner Truth
9 “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Security is mostly a superstion. It does not exist in nature.”
Helen Keller
10 “I ask no favors of my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our bretheren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground.”
Sarah Grimke
11 “War is good for the economy like cannibalism is nutritious.”
George Bernard Shaw
12 “If society will not admit of woman’s free development, then society must be remodeled.”
Elizabeth Blackwell
13 “He is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.”
Frederick Douglas
14 “I believe there is still something inherent in the fibre of America worth saving, and that the fortunes of the entire world may well ride on the ability of young Americans to face the responsibilities of an old America gone mad.”
Phil Ochs
16 “What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.”
Barbara Jordan
17 “The varieties of bigotry spring from a common root. To tolerate one form, either wittingly or not, is to accept all the rest. In order to contain the disease, and not just its various expression, the contagion must be attacked at its root, and with the full, undiluted force of the whole of society. A slur agains any group by a member of another can never go unremarked if our society is to have any long-term future.”
Randall Robinson
