radicals quotes

Albert Camus: 

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

Angela Davis: 

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Audre Lorde : 

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

Eugene V. Debs: 

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.

H. L. Mencken: 

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

Hannah Arendt: 

It is well known that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

James A. Garfield: 

I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not a fool, which is a matter of no small difficulty.

Joe Hill: 

I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning -- organize.

Leo C. Rosten: 

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

Mark Twain: 

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Mignon McLaughlin: 

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Paulo Freire: 

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Philip Slater: 

Change can take place only when liberal and radical pressures are both strong. Intelligent liberals have always recognized the debt they owe to radicals, whose existence permits liberals to push further than they would otherwise have dared, all the while posing as compromisers and mediators. Radicals, however, have been somewhat less sensible of their debt to liberals, partly because of the rather single-minded discipline radicals are almost forced to maintain, plagued as they always are by liberal backsliding and timidity on the one hand and various forms of self-destructiveness and romantic posing on the other.... Liberal reforms and radical change are thus complementary rather than antagonistic. Together they make it possible continually to test the limits of what can be done. Liberals never know whether the door is unlocked because they are afraid to try it. Radicals, on the other hand, miss many opportunities for small advances because they are unwilling to settle for so little.

William Lloyd Garrison: 

Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation.

Woodrow Wilson: 

By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative,' one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary,' one who won't go at all.