Quotes About Empowerment

It's more than a little ironic that many of us preach safety first to our children, nieces, and nephews but in our roles as programmers scream for freedom, a hybrid of the Wild West gunslinger and teenage driver. Give us freedom, give us the resources, and watch us fly.

We must learn to draw from misfortune the means of future strength.

If a patient cannot clean his teeth, no dentist can clean them for him.

truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.

You cannot keep birds from flying over your head but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair

All we who believe on Christ are kings and priests in Christ.

The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.

All Believers are Priests

For we Germans are snoring, buried in sleep and wine, and we are destitute of leaders who could measure up in wisdom, strategy, and strength of heart to manage such great undertakings.

You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression. . . . There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.

Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime.

Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can't win... the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within.

The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.

The tortuous road which has led from Montgomery to Oslo is a road over which millions of Negroes are traveling to find a new sense of dignity. It will, I am convinced, be widened into a superhighway of justice.

Even when the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference.... In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

When the Negro was completely an underdog, he needed white spokesmen. Liberals played their parts in this period exceedingly well.... But now that the Negro has rejected his role as an underdog, he has become more assertive in his search for identity and group solidarity; he wants to speak for himself.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.

The majority of the Negroes who took part in the year-long boycott of Montgomery's buses were poor and untutored; but they understood the essence of the Montgomery movement; one elderly woman summed it up for the rest. When asked after several weeks of walking whether she was tired, she answered: "My feet is tired, but my soul is at rest."

In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.