Direct Action Quotes

“But what the working-class can do, when once they grow into a solidified organization, is to show the possessing class, through a sudden cessation of all work, that the whole social structure rests on them; that the possessions of the others are absolutely worthless to them without the workers' activity; that such protests, such strikes, are inherent in the system of property and will continually recur until the whole thing is abolished -- and having shown that effectively, proceed to expropriate. ”
― Voltairine de Cleyre

“Connell doesn't read the campus papers much, but he has still managed to hear about the debating society inviting a neo-Nazi to give a speech. It's all over social media. There was even an article in The Irish Times. Connell hasn't commented on any of the Facebook threads, but has liked several comments calling for the invite to be rescinded, which is probably the most strident political action he has ever taken in his life.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.”
― Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal

“What we believe deep in our hearts—the hymn ["We Shall Overcome"] avows—is not that God will save us but that we shall overcome our subordination through collective action. (372)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“Listen, direct action—direct action is the third best feeling in the world.”
“What’s the second?”
“Peeling off a wet swimsuit.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Anymal liberationists who release fox or chinchillas from fur farms, free veal calves from chains in abysmal crates, destroy transport trucks that haul terrified turkeys and sheep to their premature deaths, burn slaughterhouses that dismember pigs and chickens, or destroy computers in research facilities are not dangerous terrorists. Anymal liberationists simply believe that life is precious, and that an industry designed to manipulate and destroy life for the sake of profits is ethically and spiritually unacceptable.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions

“Anymal liberationists do not target life—they target industries (and profits) that flourish at the expense of life—and they attempt to rescue the exploited. Terrorists kill randomly; anymal liberationists have never killed anyone. Anymal liberationists exemplify what it is to live into the core teachings of every major religion concerning rightful relations between human beings and anymals.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions

“I don’t think we’re as far apart as you say. I mean, when the shit comes down, we’ll both be on the same side of the barricades.’
‘The shit is already down.’
‘I mean when people are dying in the streets.’
‘Kate, people are dying in the streets. It’s not the movies, where the world divides into freedom fighters and brownshirts. Here in New York City there are people who take action and people who do nothing. Doing nothing is a position. It means giving approval without having actively to say so.”
― Sarah Schulman, People in Trouble

“When Constantine was told that the Roman rabble had stoned the head of his statue, he raised his hands to his head and said, ‘How remarkable. I don’t feel the least bit hurt.”
― Susan Vreeland, The Passion of Artemisia

“If you or I were to see somebody in the street beating a dog, and we said “please don’t beat your dog,” but he carried on beating the dog, we would have to use some force—which could be defined as violence—to stop that from happening. Now would that be wrong? I’d say of course it wouldn’t. And I don’t see the difference, in moral terms, between someone beating their dog in the street and somebody torturing an animal in a laboratory.
~ Ronnie Lee”
― Jon Hochschartner, The Animals' Freedom Fighter: A Biography of Ronnie Lee, Founder of the Animal Liberation Front

“The oppressed class, although the ideology of the oppressing class is imposed upon it, nevertheless elaborates religious, ethical and political ideas corresponding to its condition of life; vague and secret at first, they gain in precision and force in proportion as the oppressed class takes definite form and acquires the consciousness of its social utility and of its strength; and the hour of its emancipation is near when its conception of nature and of society opposes itself openly and boldly to that of the ruling class.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy