Words matter. These are the best David Dellinger Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Dostoyevsky was an influence – what’s his name, the saintly priest in ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ Father Zossima… ‘Kiss the earth,’ he’d say. Love everything.
Charlie Parker said, ‘Jazz comes from who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve done. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.’ It’s the same with the revolution.
Prison is what really radicalized me most deeply. I remember thinking, my God, these people did things that were no worse than what other people do. They’re just as nice.
We need to think about the future, not the past.
Let the Third World get some self-determination. Let the Nicaraguans make their own mistakes.
I think that anybody gradually learns the things that go deeper than his own heart.
We have become used to the missiles being among us. We don’t think about what they can do.
Out of the warmth and loving nature of my home, I got an impulse of a politics that was very different from my father’s.
When people asked me what I thought when Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street, I would say, ‘I still feel palpitations of love, even if I’ve gone in one direction and he’s gone in another.’
No matter how superficially fair the judge is, he is still the complete autocrat in the courtroom, and he still comes from the ruling class.
I’m just a feeble old man but I represent the spirit of speaking out.
The Yippies, their lifestyle is different from mine. But I consider Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman inspired critics of the kind of society that we have.
I have great hope, great faith in the coming generation.
Very few people choose war. They choose selfishness and the result was war.
All I have to do is look at a child’s smile to keep going.
Because I helped organize non-violent protest in Chicago, New York and Washington, I am denied the fundamental freedom to travel to London, even for the purpose of visiting my daughter.
It doesn’t pay to pretend that Vietnam was not a criminal war.
My position has always been to avoid violence to avoid provocation.
I enjoy life this way, I enjoy life being in solidarity with the people who are fighting for a better world.
I think the myth about the ‘silent generation’ is just that, a myth.
I believe that the United States has no possible ability to pacify the Vietnamese people, win support for Thieu, win a political victory or a military victory in the air, on the ground, in the North or the South.
Living among society’s outcasts and experiencing the brutality of America’s prison system did more to set (or confirm) the direction of my adult life than living at Yale.
The arrogance of power must be undermined.
I received more genuine religious stimulation in prison than in the seminary.
This court is in contempt of human life, dignity and justice.
Americans get fooled because we think we’re trying to help the peasants down there in El Salvador, even though we’re propping up that oppressive government, among the most brutal and militaristic in the world.
It’s one thing to be prejudiced. It’s another to be a liar.
There will be no solution in Lebanon until there is a general solution of Israel and the Palestinian people. There will be no solution until the Palestinian people have their own state.
If the U.S. has its Vietnam… the Soviet Union has its Czechoslovakia. If the U.S. has its blacks and chicanos, then the Soviets have their Jews.
I went from Yale to jail, and got a good education in both places.
When I see you looking to me, I have to say, ‘Build your own lives.’
Whatever happens to us, however unjustified, will be slight compared to what has happened already to the Vietnamese people, to the Black people in this country, to the criminals with whom we are now spending our days in the Cook County jail.
Political democracy has failed in the U.S. because there hasn’t been economic democracy.
Bernie Sanders is our Jesse Jackson only more so.
We have to face up to the fact that five administrations have lied to us about Vietnam.
