“… I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderates… Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.  Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

Letter from Birminham Jail- MLK

“The quantity of every commodity brought to market naturally suits itself to the effectual demand. It is the interest of all those who employ their land, labour, or stock, in bringing any commodity to market, that the quantity never should exceed the effectual demand; and it is the interest of all other people that it never should fall short of that demand.” 

Wealth of Nations- Adam Smith

 “Our task now is to identify a remedy for the problems that we anticipate in relaxing women’s seclusion. The most effective remedy, in our opinion, is a type of upbringing that will itself become an impenetrable veil and fortress protecting a woman from all forms of corruption at each stage of her liberation.” 

Amin- The liberation of women

 “…a further type of advice was offered by those engaged in pastoral care to address the suffering caused by the uncertainty of one’s salvation status. Restless work in a vocational calling was recommended as the best possible means to acquire self-confidence that one belonged among the elect. Work, and work alone, banishes religious doubt and gives certainty of one’s status among the saved”

Max Weber- Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 

“…I don't believe in any kind of integration; I'm not even worried about it, because I know you're not going to get it anyway…But we will still work with you on the school boycotts because we're against a segregated school system. A segregated school system produces children who, when they graduate, graduate with crippled minds. But this does not mean that a school is segregated because it's all black. A segregated school means a school that is controlled by people who have no real interest in it whatsoever.”

Malcom X- The ballot of the bullet

 “… anyone can see that because the bonds of servitude are formed only through the mutual dependence of men and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to enslave a man without first putting him in a state where he cannot do without another man, and since such a situation does not exist in the state of nature, each man there is free of the yoke, and the law of the strongest is nullified”

Rousse- Discourse of Inequality

“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”

Communist Manifesto- Karl Marx

“In an under-developed country experience proves that the important point is not that three hundred people understand and decide but that all understand and decide, even it if takes twice or three times as long. In fact the time taken to explain, the time ‘lost’ humanizing the worker, will be made up in the execution. People must know where they are going and why. The politician should be aware that the future will remain bleak as long as the people’s consciousness remains rudimentary, primary, and opaque.” 

The wretched of the Earth- Fannon 

“Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them…” 

John Stuart Mill- On Liberty

“Aggressiveness was not created by property… If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing.” 

“I wish that men would understand the importance of this complete tie between a man and his mother. It is the crux of everything I have written in this book, and I repeat: it is impossible to have successful men unless their mothers can prepare them for success.” 

Amin- The liberation of Women

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never engaged in a direct-action movement that was well-timed according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘wait.’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’” 

Letter from Birmingham Jail- Marting Luther King

Analysis: MLK says that there is no perfect time to protest. They shouldn't have to wait for a right time to protest. He says that no one will ever voluntarily give up their power, which is why they most protest. 

“Giving women the right to paradise posed fewer problems than giving them the right to inheritance and booty, which greatly increased the sacrifices that the male believer had to make to Allah. If men had need of God, God also had need of men.” 

The Veil and the Male Elite- Mernissi

“You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English, and, when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englistan. This is not the Swaraj I want.”

Hind Swaraj- Ghandi

Analysis: You want to have the government and regulations from England, but not having to be ruled by the English. 

“When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it on is the level of human rights. Civil rights keeps you under his restrictions, under his jurisdiction. Civil rights keeps you in his pocket. Civil rights means you're asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth. And any time anyone violates your human rights, you can take them to the world court.”

Malcom X- The Bullet or the Ballet

“Her life is not directed toward goals: she is absorbed in producing or maintaining things that are never more than means—food, clothes, lodging—these are inessential intermediaries between animal life and free existence; the only value that is attached to inessential means is usefulness… Thus utility reigns higher than truth, beauty, and freedom in the housewife’s heaven; and this is the point of view from which she envisages the whole universe...” 

“Therefore when alienated labour tears from man the object of his production, it also tears from him his species-life, the real objectivity of his species and turns the advantage he has over animals into a disadvantage in that his inorganic body, nature, is torn from him.”

Karl Marx- On Alienated Labor

“During the Medinese period, the community lived the Muslim ideal, in which God and His Prophet could be consulted at any moment, the former through the intermediary of the latter. It is this decade that is being claimed today as the key moment embodying the principles that should guide the planning of economic and social relationships of modern Muslim societies.” 

The Veil and the Male Elite- Mernissi

 “It would be sad for us to be forced to admit that this distinctive and nearly unlimited faculty [of perfectibility] was the source of all man’s unhappiness and, in time, draws him out of that primordial condition in which he would savour peaceful and innocent days; and that it was this faculty, causing over the centuries his acumen and his errors, his vices and virtues to flourish, which eventually makes man a tyrant over himself and nature.”

“The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be. For to the extent that asceticism moved out of the monastic cell and was carried over into the life of work in a vocational calling, and then commenced to rule over this-worldly morality, it helped to do its part to build the mighty cosmos of the modern economic order… This cosmos today determines the style of life not only of those directly engaged in economically productive activity, but of all born into this grinding mechanism.” 

Max Weber: The protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism 

“It will not be denied by anybody that originality is a valuable element in human affairs. There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices and set the example of more enlightened conduct and better taste and sense in human life.” 

On Liberty- John Stuart Mill

 “The colonized subject is constantly on his guard: Confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line.  Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse… But deep down the colonized subject acknowledges no authority. He is dominated but not domesticated. He is made to feel inferior, but by no means convinced of his inferiority. He patiently waits for the colonist to let his guard down and then jumps on him.” 

-Fannon- The wretched of the Earth

 “… the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and … constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization… I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another.” 

Sigmund Freud: On Civilization and its Discontents

“Even the woman who has emancipated herself from man is still not in a moral, social, or psychological situation identical to him… The advantage man enjoys and which manifests itself from childhood onward is that his vocation as a human being in no way contradicts his destiny as a male… he is not divided.”  

Simone De Beauvoir- The Second Sex

 “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being exactly in the same situation, he is enabled to exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs. He supplies them abundantly with what they have occasion for, and they accommodate him as amply with what he has occasion for, and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society.” 

Wealth of Nations- Adam Smith

“A man who has realized his manhood, who fears only God, will fear no one else. Man-made laws are not necessarily binding on him… If man will only realize that it is unmanly to obey laws that are unjust, no man’s tyranny will enslave him. This is the key to self-rule or home-rule.” 

-Ghandi: Hind Swaraj