Our Time Is Now Quotes

“Because I learned long ago that winning doesn’t always mean you get the prize. Sometimes you get progress, and that counts.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Voting is a constitutional right in the United States, a right that has been reiterated three separate times via constitutional amendment.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Single-strand identities do not exist in a household, let alone in a nation. When America is at its best, we acknowledge the complexity of our societies and the complicating reality of how we experience this country—and its obstacles. Yet we never lose sight of the fact that we all want the same thing. We want education. We want economic security. We want health care. Identity politics pushes leaders to understand that because of race, class, gender, sexual orientation/gender identity, and national origin, people confront obstacles that stem from these identities. Successful leaders who wish to engage the broadest coalition of voters have to demonstrate that they understand that the barriers are not uniform and, moreover, that they have plans to tackle these impediments. The greatest politicians display both of these capacities, and they never forget that the destination—regardless of identity—is the same: safety, security, and opportunity.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Full citizenship rights are the bare minimum one should expect from the government. Yet, for two-thirds of our history, full citizenship was denied to those who built this country from theory to life. African slaves and Chinese workers and Native American environmentalists and Latino gauchos and Irish farmers—and half the population: women. Over the course of our history, these men and women, these patriots and defenders of liberty, have been denied the most profound currency of citizenship: power. Because, let’s be honest, that is the core of this fight. The right to be seen, the right to be heard, the right to direct the course of history are markers of power. In the United States, democracy makes politics one of the key levers to exercising power. So, it should shock none of us that the struggle for dominion over our nation’s future and who will participate is simply a battle for American power.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Yet, from limiting original voting rights to white men, to the elitist and racist origins of the Electoral College, American democracy has always left people out of participation, by design.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“We are strongest when we see the most vulnerable in our society, bear witness to their struggles, and then work to create systems to make it better”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Arguments continue over what constitutes true “identity politics” as a philosophical construct, a public policy imperative, or a flawed means of picking candidates based solely on external characteristics rather than the candidate’s own merit. Rather than engaging in a false choice, I opt to short-circuit the debate with a more simplistic view: identity is real and necessary and intertwined in our politics in such a way that there is no going back.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Voter suppression works its might by first tripping and causing to stumble the unwanted voter, then by convincing those who see the obstacle course to forfeit the race without even starting to run.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“The voting system is not just political; it is economic and social and educational. It is omnipresent and omniscient. And it is fallible. Yet, when a structure is broken, we are fools if we simply ignore the defect in favor of pretending that our democracy isn’t cracking at the seams. Our obligation is to understand where the problem is, find a solution, and make the broken whole again.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Identity politics forces those who ask for our support to do their jobs: To understand that the self-made man got zoned into a good school district and received a high-quality education, one that wouldn’t have existed if his zip code changed by a digit. To recognize that the woman on welfare with three kids is the product of divorce in a state where she risks losing food stamps if her low-wage job pays her too much. Or that the homeless junkie is an Iraq War veteran who was in the National Guard but lost his job due to multiple deployments and didn’t qualify for full VA care. And that the laborer is a migrant farmworker who overstayed his visa to care for his American-born children. Single-strand identities do not exist in a household, let alone in a nation.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Abroad, authoritarians and dictators win elections and reshape democracies into parodies of freedom. The same world leaders who once feared disappointing American leaders now use our compromised elections to justify their own behavior.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“The right to be seen, the right to be heard, the right to direct the course of history are markers of power.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Moreover, because only Maine and Vermont allow the incarcerated to vote, prisoners in every other state have no political voice. To put a finer point on it, America’s mass incarceration has led to thousands of black and Latino bodies from Democratic-leaning areas being counted in rural white communities that are typically Republican, where most of the penal facilities are located.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Saving democracy is not an overblown call to action—we are in trouble. The changing demography of America speaks to more than whether Democrats or Republicans control political decisions. Young people will be financially responsible for the largest population of elderly Americans in our history, but without the resources necessary to provide for them. The increased frequency of extreme climate events costs billions of dollars that will not be spent on education or infrastructure. The past fifty years of public policy toward communities of color have consequences. For decades, black and brown children have had higher dropout rates, higher incarceration rates, and lower earning power. This very same population continues to grow in size and political might, but America has largely abandoned our tradition of civic education to help guide their decisions. And international crises will demand American attention, but without a cogent and consensus-driven electorate, we will likely be paralyzed by inaction or stupid decision making. We”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Voting rights are the most basic tenet of our democracy, and the bare minimum one should expect from the government.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Voter suppression no longer announces itself with a document clearly labeled LITERACY TEST or POLL TAX. Instead, the attacks on voting rights feel like user error—and that’s intentional. When the system fails us, we can rail and try to force change. But if the problem is individual, we are trained to hide our mistakes and ignore the concerns. The fight to defend the right to vote begins with understanding where we’ve been and knowing where we are now.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“The vibrance of our identity politics reaffirms the complexity of our nation and the underpinning of our founding.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Americans like to think that we're invulnerable, but we are not. Our systems are not. Our democracy may be resilient, but it is also fragile. And that fragility is what is at stake now.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Difference is real, and to acknowledge such does no harm to the American identity as a whole. The vibrance of our identity politics reaffirms the complexity of our nation and the underpinning of our founding.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Every person comes into the public discourse with histories and challenges. The worst political spaces are the ones where voters are told that everyone has the exact same narrative and everyone faces the exact same obstacles. The myth of the self-made man coexists with the stereotype of the welfare queen and the homeless junkie and the Spanish-speaking laborer. When political leaders homogenize our experiences or, worse, reduce them to insults or aberrations, they evade the hard work of understanding whom they represent.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“I embrace identity politics because for the marginalized, the disadvantaged, and the minority groups still grappling for purchase in our politics, identity is the strongest defense against invisibility.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Those who rage against and work against expanding the electorate know what's at stake. The goal is to block access to the ballot and to policy making because letting the agitators inside might yield new laws to remedy inequality or injustice. The fear of these elected officials is a loss of power, grounded in an assortment of causes like racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, or an inchoate desire to keep the world as it was when they sat at the peak of influence. They forget that the bygone days of political tranquility never truly existed—the agitators simply hadn't amassed sufficient power to be heard. But they are getting closer to it every day.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“No other right guaranteed by our constitution permits the loss of a right for failure to use it—to wit, I don't lose my Second Amendment right if I choose not to go hunting and I still have freedom of religion if I skip church now and then.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“The United States must no longer be a patchwork of good, bad, and worst states for voters, a degradation of democracy based on state lines and zip codes. Being an eligible citizen should be sufficient for full participation,”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“…any voter denied a say in democracy has been harmed, and a remedy is in order regardless of the effect on an electoral outcome.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“However, across the country, we witnessed a “power grab” from the minority desperate to hold on to power. The examples of this abound: Native Americans living on reservations in North Dakota were told that in order to vote, they had to have street addresses—where none existed. In Mississippi, impoverished elderly folks who needed an absentee ballot had to pay for a notary public to submit the ballot—resulting in a new-fashioned poll tax. In Georgia, tens of thousands of people of color had their applications for registration held up because of typographical errors in government databases and a failed system called “exact match.” Of the 53,000 applications blocked by this process, 80 percent were from people of color. Voter”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Any lasting solutions come solely from the U.S. Constitution, the highest legal bar imaginable; and over the centuries, we clawed out access to the ballot for people of color through the Fifteenth Amendment, women in the Nineteenth Amendment, and young voters in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. But each of those amendments contained a loophole for suppression: leaving implementation to the states, particularly the ones most hostile to inclusion.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“Victory must begin to mean more than winning a single election. Our obligation, in Georgia and across the nation, is to seize the high road by changing how we campaign and to whom. Demography is not destiny; it’s opportunity. We have to expand our vision of who belongs in the big tent of progress, invest in their inclusion, and talk to them about what’s at stake.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“A Dreamer—a young person brought to the United States without documentation—asked me about her future after high school. She had applied to colleges in state, but Georgia’s rules forbade her from being accepted to the flagship universities, despite her qualifications. Other state schools were required to charge her out-of-state tuition, at costs that could be nearly four times as high.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

“and over the centuries, we clawed out access to the ballot for people of color through the Fifteenth Amendment, women in the Nineteenth Amendment, and young voters in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. But each of those amendments contained a loophole for suppression: leaving implementation to the states, particularly the ones most hostile to inclusion.”
― Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America