Quotes by activists & reformers

Truth did give a famous speech for women's rights in 1851, but the refrain “Ain't I a woman?” appears only in a version published twelve years later by another activist.

Howe called on mothers everywhere to unite and refuse to let their sons be sent to kill other mothers' sons. Her Mother's Day was a day of protest for peace.

Gandhi did write that changing ourselves changes how the world treats us. The neat one-line slogan is a modern paraphrase that does not appear anywhere in his writings.

Said by Mandela at the launch of an educational broadcasting project. For a man whose people had been denied decent schooling under apartheid, education was a form of liberation.

Douglass's argument that freedom is never handed over by those in power. It has to be demanded, and the demand will be uncomfortable.

King's answer to clergymen who called him an outside agitator. Because all communities are tied together, he argued, he had every right to be in Birmingham.

A promise that justice wins in the long run, even when progress is slow. King's compact wording condenses a longer image from an abolitionist sermon of 1853.