Angela Davis has been writing and speaking about freedom for more than fifty years — as a scholar, as an author, and as someone whose own life was shaped by the movements she writes about. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944, she grew up in a segregated city, studied philosophy, and wrote books still read in classrooms today, including “Women, Race & Class” and “Are Prisons Obsolete?”
What makes her lines last is their clarity. She explains hard ideas in plain sentences, and connects personal feeling to shared responsibility. This collection of angela davis quotes draws on her books, essays, and speeches, with a short note beside each line. Read more about her life on her Wikipedia page. Readers who value her focus on dignity may also enjoy these self-love quotes.
Angela Davis Quotes on Freedom and Justice
Freedom, for Davis, is never only personal. These lines define it as shared, practical, and unfinished.
- “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” — Angela Davis — Her most quoted line; it turns a familiar prayer about acceptance into a decision to act.
- “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.” — Angela Davis — Her plain definition of a word people often use without explaining; roots, not surfaces.
- “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be antiracist.” — Angela Davis — Repeated in her speeches for decades, on the difference between neutrality and taking a side.
- “The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?” — Angela Davis — Interview questions that test any grand claim about liberty against an empty table.
- “We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.” — Angela Davis — Change, she argues, must happen in thinking as well as in laws.
- “Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.” — Angela Davis — Her economic reading of racism, stated as directly as she ever stated it.
- “We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.” — Angela Davis — From “If They Come in the Morning,” her early book; on the cost of the work.
- “Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing in a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.” — Angela Davis — Written in her twenties; she has kept the commitment the line describes.
- “Freedom is a constant struggle.” — Angela Davis — The title of her 2016 book, taken from a movement song.
- “If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.” — Angela Davis — From “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” on why honest language comes before action.
Angela Davis Quotes on Hope and Collective Action
Davis is often described as hopeful, but her hope is a practice, not a temperament. It shows up in groups, over time, without guarantees.
- “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” — Angela Davis — Lecture advice: act on the possibility, rather than waiting to feel sure.
- “It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.” — Angela Davis — From “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle”; hope kept in company lasts longer.
- “Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.” — Angela Davis — For volunteers and campaigners in the long middle of an effort.
- “The importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to consider yourself not as a single individual, but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.” — Angela Davis — Her answer, in interviews, to why the work is worth a life.
- “It is important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization, a movement.” — Angela Davis — Feeling concerned is a start, she says; joining something is the next step.
- “Walls turned sideways are bridges.” — Angela Davis — Her shortest image of transformation: the same material, laid down differently, connects.
- “Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives.” — Angela Davis — From her writing on art and culture; a reason to take songs and poems seriously.
- “We have no choice but to continue the struggle.” — attributed to Angela Davis — An attributed summary line from her interviews on carrying on.
- “Histories of resistance do not disappear over time.” — attributed to Angela Davis — From her talks on memory; defeats still leave instructions behind.
Angela Davis Quotes on Women, Feminism and Society
Her 1981 book “Women, Race & Class” argued that gender, race, and class shape one another. These lines carry that argument in her own voice.
- “Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender.” — Angela Davis — The opening move of many of her talks: the subject is bigger than its label.
- “Feminism must involve consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and post-colonialities, and ability, and more genders, more sexualities, more identities than we can even imagine.” — Angela Davis — From a speech on feminist futures; a list that keeps opening outward.
- “To understand how any society functions, you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.” — Angela Davis — A research rule from her teaching years, and a fair question for any history book.
- “My politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people’s struggle for liberation.” — Angela Davis — From her autobiography, on where her commitments began as a Black woman.
- “Race, gender and class are not separate issues.” — attributed to Angela Davis — An attributed summary of the central argument of “Women, Race & Class.”
- “Women of color have so often been at the forefront of movements for change.” — attributed to Angela Davis — From her speeches honoring organizers whose names rarely reach headlines.
- “We represent the powerful forces of change that are determined to prevent the dying cultures of racism and hetero-patriarchy from rising again.” — Angela Davis — From her Women’s March speech in Washington, January 2017.
- “We recognize that we are collective agents of history, and that history cannot be deleted like web pages.” — Angela Davis — Also from the Women’s March speech; shared agency, in a modern image.
Angela Davis Quotes on Prisons and Abolition
Davis co-founded Critical Resistance and wrote “Are Prisons Obsolete?”, the book most associated with the modern abolition movement. These lines state her position and her reasoning.
- “Prisons do not disappear social problems. They disappear human beings.” — Angela Davis — The best-known sentence from her prison writing.
- “Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo — obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.” — Angela Davis — A harsh description, from years of study and her own time facing charges in the 1970s.
- “The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities.” — Angela Davis — From “Are Prisons Obsolete?”; the prison hides the problem, she argues, rather than solving it.
- “Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty.” — Angela Davis — Also from “Are Prisons Obsolete?”; her case that other responses were never tried.
- “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It is about building life-affirming institutions.” — Angela Davis — A formulation from her recent work, defining abolition by what it builds.
- “The prison has become a receptacle for those who are deemed disposable.” — attributed to Angela Davis — A summary line from her lectures on the prison industrial complex.
- “Abolition asks us to imagine, and to build, a world in which prisons are unnecessary.” — attributed to Angela Davis — A summary of her abolition lectures, where imagination is practical work.
- “Punishment alone does not make a society safer.” — attributed to Angela Davis — A short form of an argument across her prison books and interviews.
- “Instead of more prisons, we should be building schools, housing, and care.” — attributed to Angela Davis — A summary line from her recent speeches, contrasting two ways to spend.
How to Use These Quotes
For an essay or presentation, the book lines are your strongest material — quote from “Are Prisons Obsolete?” or “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle” and name the book beside her name. Teachers can check those sources in seconds.
For a message to someone doing long, unglamorous work, the glimmer-on-the-horizon line fits best; it respects effort that has not paid off yet. On social media, the root line and the walls-and-bridges line travel well alone. In a reading group, pair one Davis line with one from these life quotes for inspiration and talk about where the voices agree.
How to Choose the Right Quote
Choose by the job the quote has to do. To open a talk, the “no longer accepting” line sets a clear, active tone. To comfort a tired team, choose collectivities and reservoirs of hope. To explain a difficult idea simply, the root line does in nine words what a paragraph cannot.
For formal writing, prefer lines credited directly to her books and speeches. Attributed summary lines are fine for a caption, but keep “attributed” with them, as this page does.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Angela Davis’s most famous quote?
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept” is her most widely shared line. It is printed on posters and murals worldwide and is quoted throughout her later speeches and interviews.
Which books do most Angela Davis quotes come from?
The best-known sources are “Women, Race & Class” (1981), “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (2003), and “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle” (2016), along with her autobiography and her many recorded lectures and interviews.
What does Angela Davis mean by “radical”?
She defines it herself: radical simply means grasping things at the root. It is about reaching the cause of a problem rather than trimming its surface.
Can I use Angela Davis quotes in an essay or school project?
Yes. Short, correctly attributed excerpts from her published books are a normal part of essays and coursework. Name the book when you can, and keep her exact wording inside the quotation marks.
Where can I find a short quote for every day?
One Davis line a week, read slowly, goes a long way. For daily variety, these thought of the day inspirational quotes offer a fresh line for each morning.
Conclusion
Davis writes like someone who expects her readers to act, and respects them enough to explain her reasoning in full. Take the line that matches the work in front of you — a root to grasp, a wall to lay sideways, a glimmer you cannot see yet — and keep it somewhere you will meet it again on a harder day. Freedom, in her telling, is a constant struggle, and a shared one.
