Top 35 Patrisse Khan-Cullors Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

2. “There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

3. “The binary that makes a person either good or bad is a dangerously false one for the widest majority of people. I am beginning to see that more than a single truth can live at the same time and in the same person.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

4. “We say we deserve another knowing, the knowing that comes when you assume your life will be long, will be vibrant will be healthy. We deserve to imagine a world without prisons and punishment, a world where they are not needed, a world rooted in mutuality. We deserve to at least aim for that.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

5. “There are drugs to take when a person is having a psychotic break. Those drugs can bring the person back into a good or total semblance of themselves. This was not what they did to my brother. They drugged Monte to incapacitate him, to incapacitate his humanity. To leave him with no dignity.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

6. “If I die in police custody, know that they killed me. If I die in police custody, show up at the jail, make noise, protest, tell my mother. If I die in police custody, tell the entire world: I wanted to live.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

7. “I carry the memory of living under that terror – the terror of knowing that I, or any member of my family, could be killed with impunity – in my blood, my bones, in every step I take. And yet I was called a terrorist.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

8. “We are firm in our conviction that our lives matter by virtue of our birth, and by virtue of the service we have offered to people, systems and structures that did not love, respect or honor us. And while we are cultivating this idea in our respective meetings and our respective teams, we, Alicia, Opal and I, do not want to control it. We want it to spread like wildfire.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

9. “What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter” – Patrisse Khan Cullers.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

10. “As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

11. “He loves as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

12. “How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

13. “Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

14. “We agree that there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not love, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude, on that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

15. “I do not remember ever going to a movie with my mother, window shopping. I do not remember us as relaxed, as humans being. We have always had to be humans doing.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

16. “I cannot help think that the drug war, the war on gangs, has really been no more than a forced migration project. From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

17. “He tells me how he cannot remember ever feeling good about himself. He says he never did find a way to learn how to love himself. We sit with that for a time; what it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

18. “Could it be that we matter?”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

19. “Zora Neale Hurston once wrote that there are years that ask questions and there are years that answer them.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

20. “Later, when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Bundy was killing women for sport?”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

21. “And in these days, long before the influential determined that our criminal justice system needed reform, all we have is the shame of it, we who are families. There are no support groups, no places to discuss what is happening.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

22. “This is what it is like every day. Harm to white people, especially resourced white people, and the behaviors they engage in as a result, is framed sympathetically. Harm to us, more widespread, more embedded, more permanent, is framed as our own doing.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

23. “Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to out community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that. No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became and institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

24. “In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

25. “It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father’s heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity. What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable?”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

26. “Our nation, one big damn Survivor reality nightmare.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

27. “He says his real addiction is to the fast-paced energy of it all. How else was a man like him ever going to have some money in his pocket, decent clothes, be viewed as someone who mattered? He was invisible before immersing himself in the life, he said. But drugs not only made him feel seen and relevant, the lifestyle itself gave him that sense. My father, a poor Southern boy, was made fun of all his life until he had money in his pocket and a product people wanted.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

28. “I wonder if heart meds are withheld from people, cancer meds, an asthma pump? We know Hep C treatments are. And naloxone, which can reverse an OD, has been. We certainly know meds that would slow the onset of AIDS have been kept out of reach of certain groups of people. What kind of society uses medicine as a weapon, keeps it from people needing to heal, all the while continuing to develop the drugs America’s prisons use to execute people?”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

29. “WE ARE STARDUST.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

30. “I learned I didn’t matter from the very same place that lifted me up, the place I’d found my center and voice: school. And it will not be until I am an adult, determined to achieve a degree in religion, part of a long and dedicated process I undertook to become an ordained minister, that I will enjoy school again.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

31. “What if we, all of us, had access to health care that centered on the patients, not the money? Systems like this actually exist on this planet, in this time. Why is America so tethered to punishment and judgement, to one life mattering and another not?”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

32. “The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. JAMES A. BALDWIN.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

33. “Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

34. “LA County Jail were the ones who beat him for his illness. They beat him and they kept water from him and they tied him down, four-point hold, and they drugged him nearly out of existence. There are drugs to take when a person is having a psychotic break. Those drugs can bring the person back into a good or total semblance of themselves. This was not what they did to my brother. They drugged Monte to incapacitate him, to incapacitate his humanity. To leave him with no dignity.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

35. “In the state of California a human being is killed by a police officer roughly every 72 hours. Sixty-three percent of these people killed by police are Black or Latinx. Black people, 6 percent of the California population, are targeted and killed at five times the rate of whites, and three times the rate of Latinxs, who have the largest number of people killed by police. Who is protected? Who is served?”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors

36. “These pieces of family history and harm that never heal, that pass on generation to generation.”

— Patrisse Khan-Cullors