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It’s interesting that in this era of global capitalism the corporations have learned how to do that: the corporations have learned how to access aspects of our lives that cause us to often express our innermost dreams in terms of capitalist commodities. So we have internalized exchange value in ways that would have been entirely unimaginable to the authors of Capital.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (84%)

What was interesting during the protests in Ferguson last summer was that Palestinian activists noticed from the images they saw on social media and on television that tear-gas canisters that were being used in Ferguson were exactly the same tear-gas canisters that were used against them in occupied Palestine. As a matter of fact, a US company, which is called Combined Systems, Incorporated, stamps “CTS” (Combined Tactical Systems) on their teargas canisters. When Palestinian activists noticed these canisters in Ferguson, what they did was to tweet advice to Ferguson protesters on how to deal with the tear gas. They suggested, among other things: “Don’t keep much distance from the police. If you’re close to them, they can’t tear gas,” because they would be tear-gassing themselves. There was a whole series of really interesting comments for the young activists in Ferguson, who were probably confronting tear gas for the first time in their lives. They didn’t necessarily have the experience that some of us older activists have with tear gas.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (82%)

The term “genocide” has usually been reserved for particular conditions defined in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted on December 9, 1948, in the aftermath of the fascist scourge during World War II. Some of you are probably familiar with the wording of that convention, but let me share it with you: “Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such, killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (78%)

. . . opening up the discursive terrain to be able to talk about capitalism; this means we have to reintroduce the working class into our discourses. Poor people—I mean if you can’t talk about the working class, how can you talk about poor people? How can you talk about unemployed people? How can you talk about all of the people who’ve become a part of surplus populations created by global capitalism and the processes of deindustrialization that first began to happen in the 1980s? So we also have to talk about immigrant rights, because immigrant rights are very much linked to that process of globalization.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (75%)

People in this country are still unaware of the fact that former slaves brought public education to the South. That white kids in the South would never have had the opportunity to get an education had not it been for the persistent campaigns for education. Because education was equivalent to liberation. No liberation without education.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (70%)

a central endeavor of feminist, queer, and trans activists has been to dismantle the cultural ideologies, social practices, and legal norms that say certain body parts determine gender identity and gendered social characteristics and roles. We have fought against the idea that the presence of uteruses, or ovaries, or penises, or testicles, should be understood to determine such things as people’s intelligence, proper parental roles, proper physical appearance, proper gender identity, proper labor roles, proper sexual partners and activities, and capacity to make decisions. We have opposed medical and scientific assertions that affirm the purported health of traditional gender roles and activities that pathologize bodies that defy these norms. We continue to work to dispel myths that body parts somehow make us who we are (and make us “less than” or “better than,” depending on which we may have).

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (63%)

Deep understandings of racist violence arm us against deceptive solutions. When we are told that we simply need better police and better prisons, we counter with what we really need. We need to reimagine security, which will involve the abolition of policing and imprisonment as we know them. We will say demilitarize the police, disarm the police, abolish the institution of the police as we know it, and abolish imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment. But we will have only just begun to tell the truth about violence in America.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (56%)

If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (42%)

As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (40.3%)

This appalling treatment of undocumented immigrants from the UK to the US compels us to make connections with Palestinians who have been transformed into immigrants against their will, indeed into undocumented immigrants on their own ancestral lands. I repeat—on their own land. G4S and similar companies provide the technical means of forcibly transforming Palestinian into immigrants on their own land.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (39.4%)

. . . we constantly have to make connections. So that when we are engaged in the struggle against racist violence, in relation to Ferguson, Michael Brown, and New York, Eric Garner, we can’t forget the connections with Palestine. So in many ways I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality. Of always foregrounding those connections so that people remember that nothing happens in isolation. That when we see the police repressing protests in Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protests in occupied Palestine.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (33.3%)

Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army—both women and men—that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (27.7%)

I don’t think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do. I think what is most important about the sustained demonstrations that are now happening is that they are having the effect of refusing to allow these issues to die.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (27.3%)

Reform doesn’t come after the advent of the prison; it accompanies the birth of the prison. So prison reform has always only created better prisons. In the process of creating better prisons, more people are brought under the surveillance of the correctional and law enforcement networks. . . Just keep on sending them to prison. Then of course, in prison they find themselves within a violent institution that reproduces violence. In many ways you can say that the institution feeds on that violence and reproduces it so that when the person is released he or she is probably worse.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (20.3%)