Quotes about Advocacy

We've never made any gain in civil rights without constant, persistent, legal and nonviolent pressure. Don't let anybody make you feel that the problem will work itself out. For those who are telling me to keep my mouth shut, I can't do that.

As I went through this period one night I picked up an article entitled The Children of Vietnam, and I read it. And after reading that article, I said to myself, Never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation and destroying thousands and thousands of little children in Vietnam. I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.

I will do everything in my power to make it so by outspoken agreement whenever proper, and determined opposition whenever necessary.

Justice at the deepest level had but few stalwart champions.

Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the wellbeing of a person or animal is at stake.

The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

Your silence will not protect you.

Speak out for those who cannot speak"—who in the church today realizes that this is the very least that the Bible requires of us?

Do the right thing, seek the truth, defend the weak, live courageous lives.

It wouldn't be entirely clear to him until 1787, but in the meantime, as a first step in the right direction, Wilberforce championed two bills, both of which failed. One was for parliamentary reform and the other was a strange and ghoulish bill combining two macabre issues: putting an end to the burning of women at the stake, and selling the corpses of hanged criminals for dissection.

Wilberforce, only twenty-four himself, was Pitt's greatest ally there, and he stood staunchly by his friend's side during this time, both of them using their powerful oratorical skills to the fullest.