"Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?"
— Cory Doctorow

"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
— Edward R. Murrow

"The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy."
— William F. Buckley Jr.

"Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. "
— Arundhati Roy (Public Power in the Age of Empire)

"We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you do'nt fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity."
— Fred Hampton

"If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side"
— Ulysses S. Grant

"It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws."
— Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

"If not us, then who?
If not now, then when?"
— John Lewis, former Freedom Rider

"At least 600,000 men died in the Civil War. Major battles numbered the dead in the thousands; even minor skirmishes killed hundreds...Then why study the death of thirteen men?... Mass death numbs the mind and heart as it numbers its vast toll. Relief from the horror is less possible when we watch old Joe Woods and thirteen-year-old David Shelton plead for life - and then die. - Victims: A True Story of the Civil War. ix. "
— Phillip Shaw Pauldan

"In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus."
— Timothy B. Tyson (Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story)

"President Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man, but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German now."
— Roy Wilkins (Talking it over with Roy Wilkins: Selected speeches and writings)

"To-day, in more than half of Europe, man is at the mercy of the police; in 1900 even the most conservative and reactionary Prussian Junker would have been unable to imagine, let alone approve, that a citizen could be arrested and kept in prision at the pleasure of the Government."
— Salvador de Madariaga (Essays with a Purpose)

"Senator John Stennis:
'The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man. ... It freed my soul.'"
— Joe Biden (Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics)

"North was only a direction indicated by a compass--if a man had one, that is, for otherwise there was no north or south or east or west; there was only the brooding desolation."
— Shelby Foote