Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experience of other people.

Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

It's amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.

Back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem, and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continous.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft... The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

I really do think that if for one week in the United States we saw the true face of war, we saw people's limbs sheared off, we saw kids blown apart, for one week, war would be eradicated. Instead, what we see in the U.S. media is the video war game. Our mission is to make dissent commonplace in America.

The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!

At its core, war is impoverishment. War's genesis and ultimate end is in the poverty of our hearts. If we can realize that the world's liberation begins within those troubled hearts, then we may yet find peace.

If you grew up in the South Bronx today or in south-central LA, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream. Kids notice that no politicians talk about this. Nobody says we're going to make them less separate and more equal. Nobody says that.

What an extraordinary time to be alive. We're the first people on our planet to have real choice: we can continue killing each other, wiping out other species, spoiling our nest. Yet, on every continent a revolution in human dignity is emerging. It is re-knitting community and our ties to the earth. So we do have a choice. We can choose death; or we can choose life.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship. A deep democracy holds up for future generations the principle that the pursuit of justice is the condition for the pursuit of happiness.

The artist must elect to fight for freedom of for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.

The right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood. Otherwise, none of us could call our souls our own.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

I'm helping to create an economic system that will respect and protect the earth - one which would replace the corporate globalization with a corporate network of local living economies. Business is beautiful when it's a vehicle for serving the common good.

The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.