Vegetarians

"The fact that I was a junkie for a long time is only one slice of my own personal pie, which is made up of a lot of different slices.(Oct, 1994 interview)."

"You know I love pot, and I love beer, but I am totally sober, just because it completely stopped working for me. (Interview Magazine 2000)."

"Music that I really love and believe in and think is extraordinarily honest and beautiful doesn't always become popular. (Oct, 1994 interview)."

"All you slingers and fiends hide behind your rocks put down your guard I'm not here to box this is no showdown so throw down your gun you see it doesn't matter where you come from."

"The existence of sexual energy is such an every-day part of life. It's such a natural aspect of life. That we end up relating to without any shame. (Much Music 1991)."

"I'm the bloodstain On your shirt sleeve Coming down and more are coming to believe Now we know it all for sure."

"There were times when all Hillel and I had was each other. We were fucked up and understood what it was to be living in an out-of-control fog. (Scar Tissue, 2004)."

"I knew there was never anyone to blame when people get into drugs. They're always responsible for their own behavior, and it's not the dealer, and it's not the friend, it's not the childhood. (Scar Tissue, 2004)."

"When I do think, "Man a fucking motel room with a couple of thousand dollars' worth of narcotics would do me right," I just look over at my dog and remember that Buster's never seen me high. (Scar Tissue, 2004)."

"Changing and inventing new things is great. That's what we like to do. (Australia, 2002)."

"I never really had the intention of being a rock 'n' roller. It's just that all of my best friends were great musicians and they felt sorry for me so they had me. (Much Music 1991)."

"While Angela was on her tour and not always available to western reporters, Charlene and other Communist leaders sometimes put words in her mouth, denying that there was any political repression within the Soviet bloc. Not that Angela was willing to do anything to challenge that view. In fact, within the next few years, she accommodated herself to the stalest clichés in the Party's outlook. She remains to the present an important public figure, able to attract larger audiences than any other Party leader. But rarely if ever in her speeches and writings today will you see evidence of the kind of fresh thinking of which she was once capable. Whether she is capable of breaking free from Party orthodoxy is a question still to be answered."

"The Angela Davis defense campaign had been the biggest Party-initiated movement of the entire decade, and it was the one occasion on which the Party was really attuned to the political mood of the younger Left. It had a big effect on the Party and brought in a number of young recruits. Indeed, whatever political credibility the Party has had to draw upon from the early 1970s was largely a product of that campaign. Certainly nothing else it has done since compares with the importance of Angela's defense campaign in terms of image and the ability to interest outsiders. Angela Davis, not Gus Hall, has been the most attractive public face the Party has had to offer. But one of the sadder aspects of the whole episode was the impact it had on Angela herself. She felt that it was the Party and the Soviet Union which saved her life. She became unwilling to consider any criticisms of those she regarded as her saviors."

"Children were a big part of the Black Panther Movement...I was in awe of the women in the movement, like Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver and many more. They were strong and intelligent women who fought racism and sexism mainly through their words."

"I first met Angela in 1967 at a meeting to discuss how radicals should respond to the increasing level of violence directed against the Black Panthers. Angela was a young Black woman not yet twenty-four years old, strikingly beautiful, intelligent, articulate, and poised. She clearly had the potential to be anything she wanted to be, a scholar or a political leader. But she was confronted with a dilemma: she had these genuine intellectual gifts, yet had to prove herself at a time when anti-intellectualism was running rampant in the movement, when the only thing that seemed to count was proving yourself a tough street cat, able to stand up to the Man with the gun. Angela had grown up in Alabama and New York. Her mother had been involved in the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s. Angela had been a brilliant student at Brandeis University, where she studied under Herbert Marcuse, and had then gone on to graduate studies at the University of Frankfurt-all of which had prepared her for a political role as a Marxist intellectual that seemed tame and irrelevant in the heated atmosphere of the late 1960s."

"From 1969 through the mid-1970s all you had to do was say the word "Angela" and people instantly knew who you were talking about. It was not a role she was ready for, emotionally or politically, nor was it a role she welcomed: as she wrote in her autobiography, "I loathed being stared at like a curiosity object." That in itself distinguished her from many other movement "stars" who fascinated the media in the 1960s, like Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey Newton, all of whom relished, courted, and in the end were corrupted by the attention they received."

"In our country, literally for an entire year, we heard nothing at all except Angela Davis. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defence of Angela Davis. Although she didn't have too difficult a time in this country's jails, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents–but more important, a group of Czech dissidents–addressed an appeal to her: 'Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?' Angela Davis answered: 'They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.' That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you."

"Angela Davis's new book made me think of what dear Nelson Mandela kept reminding us, that we must be willing to embrace that long walk to freedom. Understanding what it takes to really be free, to have no fear, is the first and most important step one has to make before undertaking this journey. Angela is the living proof that this arduous challenge can also be an exhilarating and beautiful one."

"The shift that's occurred this time around "wasn't by happenstance," Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an activist and a writer, told me, nor is it only the product of video evidence. "It has been the work of generations of Black activists, Black thinkers, and Black scholars"-people like Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander, and others-"that has gotten us here. Six years ago, people were not using the phrase 'systemic racism' beyond activist circles and academic circles. And now we are in a place where it is readily on people's lips, where folks from CEOs to grandmothers up the street are talking about it, reading about it, researching on it, listening to conversations about it.""

"Here is someone worthy of the Ancestors who delivered her, Angela Davis has stood her ground on every issue important to the health of our people and the planet. It is impossible to read her words or hear her voice and not be moved to comprehension and gratitude for our incredible luck in having her with us."

"Angela Davis is one of the few great long-distance intellectual freedom fighters in the world...her determination to remain true to her revolutionary vocation in the intense international spotlight-has been an inspiration...She remains after more than fifty years of struggle, suffering, and service the most recognizable face of the left in the US Empire."

"Oh, yeah, I'm very familiar with Angela Davis. She was persecuted and jailed. She used to do yoga just to keep herself together."

"Part of the problem with policing, prisons, and surveillance is that it's a one-size-fits-all model. Angela Davis says this perfectly-there is no one alternative. There are a million alternatives. And the issue is to figure out which alternative works for what situation. I don't like to use the word alternative, but I will in this case. It's like what works for this particular situation that we're in? What works for these people? How are we going to actually address this based on human needs? These are the things that we're interested in as PIC abolitionists. I think that makes us actually again incredibly creative. Always generative. And also not afraid, again, of failure."

"Angela Davis says this perfectly; she's like, knowledge is built through struggle. It isn't just built through somebody theorizing an idea. But through struggle, together, we come up with new concepts and ideas: that's the best thinking."

"Davis helps us to understand that the PIC itself is a product of various reforms over time, that even the prison itself was a reform. I reiterate to people all the time: We cannot reform police. We cannot reform prisons. We cannot."

"Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?"

"When contemporary feminist movement first began, feminist writings and scholarship by black women was groundbreaking. The writings of black women like Cellestine Ware, Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis, to name a few, were all works that sought to articulate, define, speak to and against the glaring omissions in feminist work, the erasure of black female presence."

"Angela Davis has profoundly influenced the discourses on social justice in relationship to race, gender, and class nationally and internationally through her writings and her role in organizations such as the Communist Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the past, and her more recent activism through the prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance, along with being an honorary co-chair for the Women's March during 2017."

"Women experience oppression distinct from men; but, like men, we always experience oppression within the context of our racial and ethnic identities. As Angela Davis queries, when speaking of violence against women of color, "how do we develop analyses and organizing strategies... that acknowledge the race of gender and the gender of race?" This question is especially salient when considering the race-(or ethnic-) based political movements, or cultural nationalisms, initiated in the 1960s and reemergent today."

"As Angela Y. Davis points out, "we have to be consistent" in our analysis and not respond to violence in a way that compounds it. We need to use our radical imaginations to come up with new structures of accountability beyond the system we are working to dismantle."

"I learned a lot from the black arts movement. I loved reading black feminist thinkers on my own (outside of academia)—Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, June Jordan, bell hooks, etc."

"if people know about a world historical figure like Angela Y. Davis, it’s because somehow in spite of the dramatic story of her coming to national prominence, arrest, FBI most wanted. And in spite of the actual things that she’s written and said over time, that somehow all Angela Y. Davis was trying to do was get a spot in the university, or become something that would reproduce rather than interrupt the kinds of social relations that made her and her parents radical in the first place. So there’s that. So if we draw forward from when 1970, ’71, when, again, Angela was suddenly catapulted to the global stage and was, as she said, says herself, “Saved by the people.”"

"I got to be in a conversation with Angela Davis, and she was like, Yeah, we dealt with a lot of the same stuff, but now y’all know how to take care of each other and take of yourselves. And there’s just more tools."

"For more on this historic moment, we are spending the hour with the legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For half a century, Angela Davis has been one of the most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States, an icon of the Black liberation movement. Angela Davis’s work around issues of gender, race, class and prisons has influenced critical thought and social movements across several generations. She’s a leading advocate for prison abolition, a position informed by her own experience as a prisoner and a fugitive on the FBI’s top 10 wanted list more than 40 years ago. Once caught, she faced the death penalty in California. After being acquitted on all charges, she’s spent her life fighting to change the criminal justice system."

"It was my experience in the Angela Davis trial that propelled me into a study of Afro-American women's history and, ultimately, into women's studies."

"People, especially young white people, in America and in Europe are aware of what's happening in the ghetto even if their fathers maintain an obstinate ignorance. All over Europe I've seen young people who've studied the methods of the Black Liberation movement, applying those same methods to the job of forcing a bit of humanity into their profit-crazed and economically teetering countries. Of course it's got its amusing sides too and very often one is forced to rush somewhere for a drink after he's seen a group of the blond German youths with hair frizzled and worn in Afros. The parents of these kids have all picked the portrait of the President of the United States as a symbol of what was good in America...But I've been in no part of Europe where there wasn't the picture of a good American--and it was always Angela Davis!"

"We identified as revolutionary nationalists' committed to ending exploitation and colonialism. We were inspired by the herstories of women activists in Puerto Rico. We learned about Lola Rodríguez de Tió and Mariana Bracetti, early fighters for the abolition of slavery and the island's independence from Spain; Luisa Capetillo and Juana Colón, working class organizers and women's rights advocates; and Lolita Lebrón and Blanca Canales, Nationalist Party militants imprisoned for their actions to free Puerto Rico. We studied the lives of African American women such as Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist and women's rights activist, and Harriet Tubman, who freed slaves through the Underground Railroad. Our sisters in the Black Panther Party were diversifying the image of the revolutionary, and we joined the protests to demand the release of Angela Davis from a California prison, and of Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird in New York. The long line of women activists, from contemporary social justice movements, became our role models and mentors."

"The vast majority of Black people are now and have always been workers, first as slaves and then as freed men and women. And, unlike their white counterparts, the majority of Black women have always labored outside the home. Angela Davis described the unique character of the Black woman's experience in the United States, in this way: "[Although] she was a victim of the myth that only the woman with her diminished capacity for mental and physical labor should do degraded household work...the alleged benefits of the ideology of femininity did not accrue to her. She was not sheltered or protected, she would not remain oblivious to the desperate struggle for existence unfolding outside the 'home.' She was also in the fields alongside the man...""

"In the way we think about past movements, I encourage people to look beyond heroic male figures. While Martin Luther King is someone I revere, I don't like to allow his representation to erase the contributions of ordinary people. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott was successful because Black women, domestic workers, refused to ride the bus. Had they not, where would we be today? (2014)"

"what the civil rights movement did, it seems to me, was to create a new terrain for asking new questions and moving in new directions. It's not a betrayal that people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice and the Black conservatives who are the heart of government are where they are. As a matter of fact, the civil rights movement demanded access, right? But I don't think that we can assume that what was done in the 1950s and 1960s is going to do the work of the 1980s and 1990s."

"There are many versions of nationalism. And I've always preferred to identify with the pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that Black people, say Black people in the new world, do have a special responsibility to Africa and other parts of the world, Asia...not by virtue of any biological connection, not by virtue of any racial link, but by virtue of a political identification that is forged. So that it is not about Africa because Africa happens to be populated by Black people. It is about Africa because Africa has been the target of colonialism and imperialism. And what I also like about Du Bois's pan-Africanism is that it is open to notions of Afro-Asian struggles as well, and this is something, I think, that has been concealed in the conventional tellings of history at many historical gatherings that were designated as Afro-Asian solidarity. So I prefer to think about the kind of political approach that is open, that is not racially defined but that is poised against racism. (2003)"

"past struggles cannot correct current injustices (2003)"

"I’m not going to actually support either of the major candidates. But I do think we have to participate in the election... in our electoral system as it exists, neither party represents the future that we need in this country. Both parties remain connected to corporate capitalism. But the election will not so much be about who gets to lead the country to a better future, but rather how we can support ourselves and our own ability to continue to organize and place pressure on those in power. And I don’t think there’s a question about which candidate would allow that process to unfold... If we want to continue this work, we certainly need a person in office who will be more amenable to our mass pressure. And to me, that is the only thing that someone like a Joe Biden represents. But we have to persuade people to go out and vote to guarantee that the current occupant of the White House is forever ousted."

"Progressive Jewish feminists must find ways to express solidarity with their Palestinian sisters, whose families have been cruelly divested of their land and their rights by the state of Israel, and, in turn, all of us who are active in the women's movement must look on anti-Semitism as a priority in our work. Black women in particular must reveal the strong ties between racism and anti-Semitism. (1988)"

"To this day, in the US it is still said there are no political prisoners. Unlike South Africa, for example, which acknowledged Nelson Mandela as a political prisoner, here we have the guise of democracy. We're supposed to be inhabiting a country in which people have the right to free speech and political affiliation. When I was fired simply for being a member of the Communist Party, I discovered that was not the case. (2012)"

"The color line about which Du Bois spoke is not nearly as clear as it was at the time. Racialization processes are now far more complicated. Class is an important category to consider as it intersects with race and gender. The prominence of Black middle classes today combined with the putative eradication of racism within the legal sphere means that we have to think in a much more complicated way about the structures of racism and how they continue to inform US society. We need to develop an analysis that incorporates gender and class and sexuality, as well."

"When the protests began, of course, around the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade and many others who have lost their lives to racist state violence and vigilante violence — when these protests erupted, I remembered something that I’ve said many times to encourage activists, who often feel that the work that they do is not leading to tangible results. I often ask them to consider the very long trajectory of Black struggles. And what has been most important is the forging of legacies, the new arenas of struggle that can be handed down to younger generations."

"Neoliberal logic assumes that the fundamental unit of society is the individual, and I would say the abstract individual. According to that logic, Black people can combat racism by pulling themselves up by their own individual bootstraps. That logic... fails... to recognize that there are institutional barriers that cannot be brought down by individual determination. If a Black person is materially unable to attend the university, the solution is not affirmative action, they argue, but rather the person simply needs to work harder, get good grades and do what is necessary in order to acquire the funds to pay for tuition. Neoliberal logic deters us from thinking about the simpler solution, which is free education."

"The call to defund the police is, I think, an abolitionist demand, but it reflects only one aspect of the process represented by the demand. Defunding the police is not simply about withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else. And it appears as if this is the rather superficial understanding that has caused Biden to move in the direction he’s moving in. It’s about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions — mental health counselors, who can respond to people who are in crisis without arms. It’s about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation. All of these things help to create security and safety. It’s about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety And I would say that abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it’s about reenvisioning. It’s about building anew... And one sees in these abolitionist demands that are emerging the pivotal influence of feminist theories and practices... Abolition is really about rethinking the kind of future we want, the social future, the economic future, the political future. It’s about revolution, I would argue."

"We have been aware of the need for these institutional strategies at least since 1935 — but of course before, but I’m choosing 1935 because that was the year when W.E.B. Du Bois published his germinal Black Reconstruction in America. And the question was not what should individual Black people do, but rather how to reorganize and restructure post-slavery society in order to guarantee the incorporation of those who had been formerly enslaved. The society could not remain the same — or should not have remained the same. Neoliberalism resists change at the individual level. It asks the individual to adapt to conditions of capitalism, to conditions of racism."