I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.

But at the same time you can't assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.

You can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right now.

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.

And I guess what I would say is that we can't think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can't necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.

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

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

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

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.

Radical simply means "grasping things at the root."

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.

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.

When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.

That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it's not going to solve the problems.

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.

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.

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.

My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.

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

Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'

Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.

Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.

Invisible repetitive exhausting unproductive uncreative these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work

Radical simply means grasping things at the root.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available... in America right now.

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

I made a movie where I played a girl that just got out of prison and we shot it very very quickly but very intensely-that took me a long time to get over.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

Prison Break is so far-fetched, I had to make viewers believe that Michael is capable of making the impossible possible.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.