Top 110 Rights Movement Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Rights Movement Quotes from famous people such as David Talbot, Lowell Bergman, Opal Tometi, Nate Parker, Noam Chomsky, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I came at age in the '60s, and initially my hopes and d

I came at age in the ’60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time – the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.
David Talbot
What has been adjudicated and established in the wake of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement is the ability of the press to basically write or broadcast almost anything about the government. There’s very few restrictions in that way.
Lowell Bergman
Get involved in your neighborhood. That’s how I got really, really committed to the immigrant rights movement.
Opal Tometi
We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing ‘Kumbaya’. We don’t really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.
Nate Parker
Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.
Noam Chomsky
It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.
Adam Cohen
If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country, because he refuses to leave the back of the bus.
Kinky Friedman
The mindfulness revolution is not quite as dramatic as the moon shot or the civil rights movement, but I believe, in the long run, it can have just as great an impact.
Tim Ryan
There’s no problem on the planet that can’t be solved without violence. That’s the lesson of the civil rights movement.
Andrew Young
I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.
Richard Lamm
The fights for media justice and racial justice have been intertwined since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
Marvin Ammori
By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.
Bill Cosby
It’s a facet of the gay rights movement that people don’t think about enough. Why suddenly marriage equality? Because it wasn’t until 1981 that the court struck down Louisiana’s ‘head and master rule,’ that the husband was head and master of the house.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Even here in America, people are fighting for civil rights 45 years after the civil rights movement.
Ruben Santiago-Hudson
My earliest memories are when my father was the attorney general at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. We would go to visit him at the Justice Department and take the tunnel over to the FBI building and watch the sharpshooters at practice.
Kerry Kennedy
There are a lot of people in the animal rights movement who can be very passionate and aggressive, and I applaud people’s passion, but when people are judgmental and aggressive, all you end up doing is getting other people to turn away in irritation. To change people’s minds, you have to respect the people you’re talking to.
Moby
When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
Soul lyrics, soul music came at about the same time as the civil rights movement, and it’s very possible that one influenced the other.
Ahmet Ertegun
If Martin Luther King came back, he’d say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.
Henry Louis Gates
That’s what he was saying, the civil rights movement – judge me for my character, not how black my skin is, not how yellow my skin is, how short I am, how tall or fat or thin; It’s by my character.
Pam Grier
During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.
Joe Biden
What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.
David Price
If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.
Claudia Rankine
The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.
Maggie Gallagher
I have loved the Department of Justice ever since, as a young boy, I watched Robert Kennedy prove during the Civil Rights Movement how the department can – and must – always be a force for that which is right.
Eric Holder
I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.
Cory Booker
Many Catholic parishes were segregated prior to the Civil Rights movement, and the first large contingent of African-American Catholic priests would enter into the seminary in the 1920s.
Anthea Butler
I’m a child of the Civil Rights Movement.
Danny Glover
The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about.
John Hume
I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.
Al Franken
I earned my spurs in the civil rights movement. All my life, not for political but for religious reasons, moral reasons, that’s where I’ve been, and I’m proud of it, and I’ll always be there.
Walter F. Mondale
The church is the only mechanism for mass mobilization.

The church is the only mechanism for mass mobilization. That’s why the civil rights movement came out of the church.
Tony Evans
Everyone puts all of the advances that we’ve made on Dr. King, but there’s a lot of people who were part of the civil rights movement.
Ilyasah Shabazz
The social issues outside of football are not as defined as they were earlier, when integration took place and certain rights were legislated. The Civil Rights movement is over. Individuals can buy homes wherever they want, travel first class wherever they want, eat wherever they want.
Jim Brown
The civil rights movement is something I’ve looked into a lot. When I was about 23, I started reading up on it all and watching TV programmes.
Andre Gray
Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.
Michael Eric Dyson
I never remember, like, saying, ‘Well, I’m going to belong – join the civil rights movement.’
Ruby Dee
I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.
Cory Booker
In 1962, the smallest things were upsetting to authority. It wasn’t the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t the Anti-war Movement. It was something else, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.
Peter Riegert
Alabama’s Black Belt region played a central role in both the history of our great state and our country. We cannot lose sight of the Black Belt’s significant impact in the civil rights movement and the fact that this area is home to some of our state’s most celebrated cultural figures.
Tommy Tuberville
Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.
Jehane Noujaim
When you live in the South, you’re constantly part of the civil rights movement.
Wadada Leo Smith
Forgiveness became a big part of the civil rights movement, juxtaposed against the violence of protesters and law enforcement. King described forgiveness in one of his early sermons as a pardon, a process of life, and the Christian weapon of social redemption.
Anthea Butler
I got out of the Army – in my world – I came to New York, for instance, when the civil rights movement was just beginning, and that created a certain energy, a certain rumble, a certain impetus for black actors.
James Earl Jones
The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important ’cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate.
Al Franken
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement was about getting to know your culture, your history. I know all about my history.
Afeni Shakur
When I think about our babies today and them not being safe in school, I think that should be the next civil rights movement, you know, is to ban the assault weapons so that our babies can be safe.
Ruby Bridges
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.
Angela Davis
Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents’ then-illegal and interracial marriage.
Natasha Trethewey
I would want to go back to the civil rights movement and see how that was. With the information and knowledge I have about it now, I would want to see how I would deal with it.
Storm Reid
To me and to a number of other activists from the U.S., we believe that the human rights movement has to evolve and understand the global implications of structural racism. This means engaging the United Nations and a variety of other human rights bodies.
Opal Tometi