“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: They will be met.”— Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov
“Look at the faces here around you, and you see an America that is more fair and more free and more just than the one Dr. King addressed that day. We are right to savor that slow but certain progress -– progress that’s expressed itself in a million ways, large and small, across this nation every sing…”— Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov
“How much time will I spend finding the correct words to say that the color of a person’s skin is not justification for ending their life? And how much time will elapse until those words mean anything to the people who actually kill us?”— Kara Brown, jezebel.com
“I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men. They are far superior and always have been.”— William Golding, amazon.com
“We often hear that success is ‘all about the people you know’ — as if it’s just a matter of equal-opportunity relationship building. We rarely talk about how one knows them, or about the privilege that has become a prerequisite to knowing the right people. I sometimes get calls and emails from frien…”— Darren Walker, nytimes.com
“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil -- black gold! -- ghettoizin…”— Jesse Williams, billboard.com
“If you have a critique for our resistance then you’d better have an established record, a critique of our oppression.”— Jesse Williams, billboard.com
“Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we’re going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.”— Jesse Williams, billboard.com
“Discrimination is different. It pits Airbnb hosts against Airbnb guests. It creates situations that are legally and ethically ambiguous, because most hosts aren’t professional hoteliers, but rather individuals choosing to rent out their private homes. It suggests that—contrary to all branding—the Ai…”— Alison Griswold, qz.com
“My gender is a murmuration of starlings. My sexuality is a chainsaw made of lavender.”— Casey Rocheteau, siblingrivalrypress.bigcartel.com
“And so, what are we left with, besides the awareness that even in our refuges we are not safe?”— Saeed Jones, buzzfeed.com
“we are not a people born of sin and belligerent scripture... ...am I not human? is this not flesh I feel?”— onniki pooka, onniki.tumblr.com
“When I say ‘women,’ I just mean ‘not men,’’ I have heard people protest when these issues are brought up — and I get that. It’s easier. It’s simple: 'women’ equals 'not men.’ But for many of us, neither are applicable terms. And when groups refuse to acknowledge or engage in conversations about marg…”— Sam Escobar, femsplain.com
“When I asked [my dad why the sky was blue] he said it was because God’s a boy. If God were a girl, the sky would be pink. ‘What about sunrise and sunset?’ I’d asked. Dad had looked dumbfounded. 'You kids. You think too much.’ It frightened me how shallow the gene pool was that Liam and I were wading…”— Julie Anne Peters, amazon.com
“A person of good intelligence and sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it’s not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flav…”— George Carlin, bohology.tumblr.com
“Things will get easier, people’s minds will change, and you should be alive to see it.”— Ellen Degeneres, books.google.com
“Marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach gir…”— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, globalcitizen.org
“This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.”— Robert G. Ingersoll, amazon.com
“It really is crazy that the word “feminist” can have negative connotations in 2014. It upsets me that the younger generation of women think it’s a dirty word, and associate it with a kind of militantism or a sense of female superiority. It’s not. It just means liberation, and equality.”— Natalie Dormer, thedailybeast.com