Make Change Quotes

“The American government was not created for equality or harmony or fairness or any other warm and fuzzy purpose. It was created for white power. Even more specifically, it was created to protect and advance privileged white men.”
― Shaun King, Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future – A Roadmap for Social Justice by Black Lives Matter Activist Shaun King

“Our biggest problems in the world may indeed be the result of flawed systems and horribly corrupt individuals, but it’s often the ambivalence of the masses that keeps them alive. Whether you intend it to or not, your silence functions as complicity. In many ways, the silence of the masses gives the bad actors and evildoers among us permission to carry on. I know you don’t want that, but when you are stuck in a state of delay, that’s where you are. So let’s change that.”
― Shaun King, Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future – A Roadmap for Social Justice by Black Lives Matter Activist Shaun King

“The human capacity for cruelty and violence is a bottomless well. This dip we now find ourselves in absolutely can worsen if we don’t come together to organize our way out of it.”
― Shaun King, Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future – A Roadmap for Social Justice by Black Lives Matter Activist Shaun King

“Trump, full-fledged bigot that he is, rose to power on the back of white male insecurities.”
― Shaun King, Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future – A Roadmap for Social Justice by Black Lives Matter Activist Shaun King

“And merely ousting him​—​or removing any single person from elected office, for that matter​—​will not get us out. Trump did not build the systems and structures of mass incarceration. He did not plunge this world into a climate crisis. He did not cause the epidemic of gun violence or school shootings. They existed before him and will exist after him. He and his political allies must be confronted and defeated, but this nation has systemic problems that go far beyond him.”
― Shaun King, Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future – A Roadmap for Social Justice by Black Lives Matter Activist Shaun King

“Looking over thousands of years of human history, from the end of the prehistoric age up until the 1450s, instead of the quality of humanity being in a steady upward, progressive trajectory, von Ranke found that human beings perpetually alternated back and forth between improvement and regression, peace and war, provision and famine, unity and dissension, freedom and captivity, good and evil.”
― Shaun King, Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future – A Roadmap for Social Justice by Black Lives Matter Activist Shaun King

“We’d later find from the Washington Post database on police brutality that between 2015 and 2019, police have shot and killed an average of three people per day​—​nearly one thousand people per year​—​but at that moment there wasn’t widespread awareness of the issue.”
― Shaun King, Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future – A Roadmap for Social Justice by Black Lives Matter Activist Shaun King