Top 160 Angela Y. Davis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Walls turned sideways are bridges.”

— Angela Y. Davis

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

— Angela Y. Davis

Featured in: Changing the World Quotes, Resistance Quotes

3. “We must always attempt to lift as we climb.”

— Angela Y. Davis

4. “If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.”

— Angela Y. Davis

5. “It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.”

— Angela Y. Davis

6. “The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?”

— Angela Y. Davis

7. “Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’”

— Angela Y. Davis

8. “Racism cannot be separated from capitalism.”

— Angela Y. Davis

9. “I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.”

— Angela Y. Davis

10. “We are never assured of justice without a fight.”

— Angela Y. Davis

11. “Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society.”

— Angela Y. Davis

12. “Justice is indivisible. You can’t decide who gets civil rights and who doesn’t.”

— Angela Y. Davis

13. “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”

— Angela Y. Davis

14. “What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.”

— Angela Y. Davis

15. “We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.”

— Angela Y. Davis

16. “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 Y. Davis

17. “When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.”

— Angela Y. Davis

18. “We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.”

— Angela Y. Davis

19. “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 Y. Davis

20. “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 Y. Davis

21. “We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.”

— Angela Y. Davis

22. “Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.”

— Angela Y. Davis

23. “Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.”

— Angela Y. Davis

24. “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 Y. Davis

25. “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 Y. Davis

26. “Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners.”

— Angela Y. Davis

27. “As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people’s struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.”

— Angela Y. Davis

28. “Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative – these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.”

— Angela Y. Davis

29. “Anyway I don’t think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do.”

— Angela Y. Davis

30. “I feel that if we don’t take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist who is the perpetrator, then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism.”

— Angela Y. Davis

31. “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 Y. Davis

32. “I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.”

— Angela Y. Davis

33. “To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.”

— Angela Y. Davis

34. “Poor people, people of color – especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.”

— Angela Y. Davis

35. “A fair trial would have been no trial at all.”

— Angela Y. Davis

36. “There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.”

— Angela Y. Davis

37. “Everyone is familiar with the slogan “The personal is political” – not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.”

— Angela Y. Davis

38. “I’m suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.”

— Angela Y. Davis

39. “What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.”

— Angela Y. Davis

40. “Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery – did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.”

— Angela Y. Davis

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

— Angela Y. Davis

42. “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 Y. Davis

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

— Angela Y. Davis

44. “Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.”

— Angela Y. Davis

45. “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 Y. Davis

46. “It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals.”

— Angela Y. Davis

47. “Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.”

— Angela Y. Davis

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

— Angela Y. Davis

49. “We can’t talk about the black community. It’s no longer a homogeneous community; it was never a homogeneous community.”

— Angela Y. Davis

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

— Angela Y. Davis