38 Magical Angela Davis Quotes on Creating a Revolution

Angela Davis is a controversial political activist who has been motivated to create reforms in racism, feminism and the US prison system. While sustaining criticism from many including the US government, she has also been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and was most recently included in Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020, while recognized as the 1971 “Woman of the Year” in their 2020 edition of the magazine.

If you want to create a revolution, she’s the ultimate icon. You may disagree with her work alongside the Communist Party USA, but place such thoughts aside and see the power and inspiration in her words of wisdom. Clealry, she doesn’t back down and neither should you!

1. It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.

Angela Davis

2. We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

Angela Davis

3. You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

Angela Davis

4. Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.

Angela Davis

5. I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.

Angela Davis

6. But at the same time you can’t assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.

Angela Davis

7. The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

Angela Davis

8. I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

Angela Davis

9. To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Angela Davis

10. No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step.

Angela Davis

11. It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals.

Angela Davis

12. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.

Angela Davis

13. That’s true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

Angela Davis

14. You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I’m attempting to do right now.

Angela Davis

15. If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.

Angela Davis

16. Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Angela Davis

17. In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

Angela Davis

18. Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

Angela Davis

19. I’m no longer accepting the things I cannot change… I’m changing the things I cannot accept.

Angela Davis

20. This is the sports she enjoys the most. She gets so excited about it.

Angela Davis

21. Progressive art can assist people to learn what’s at work in the society in which they live.

Angela Davis

22. And I guess what I would say is that we can’t think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can’t necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.

Angela Davis

23. Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Angela Davis

24. Radical simply means “grasping things at the root.

Angela Davis

25. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

Angela Davis

26. Well of course there’s been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don’t have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

Angela Davis

27. It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it’s important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement.

Angela Davis

28. I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.

Angela Davis

29. But at the same time you can’t assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.

Angela Davis

30. I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.

Angela Davis

31. We should seek out all the doors which still remain ajar, however slight the opening might be.

Angela Davis

32. When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he’s referring to.

Angela Davis

33. I try never to take myself for granted as somebody who should be out there speaking. Rather, I’m doing it only because I feel there’s something important that needs to be conveyed.

Angela Davis

34. Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

Angela Davis

35. I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

Angela Davis

36. Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it’s perhaps far more terrible than it’s ever been.

Angela Davis

37. I sank deep into the moment, husbanding this delight, hoarding it. For I knew it would be short-lived. Work. Struggle. Confrontation lay before us like a rock-strewn road. We would walk it … But first the grass, the sun…and the people.

Angela Davis

38. I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

Angela Davis