Bayard Rustin Quotes

Let us be enraged about injustice, but let us not be destroyed by it.

We are all one - and if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way.

We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.

When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.

The real radical is that person who has a vision of equality and is willing to do those things that will bring reality closer to that vision. . .

The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn

To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true.

If I do not fight bigotry wherever it is, bigotry is thereby strengthened. And to the degree that it is strengthened, it will, thereby, have the power to turn on me.

The moral man is he who is opposed to injustice per se, opposed to injustice wherever he finds it; the moral man looks for injustice first of all in himself.

Every indifference to prejudice is suicide because, if I don’t fight all bigotry, bigotry itself will be strengthened and, sooner or later, it will return on me.

God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What God requires of us is that we not stop trying.

Bigotrys birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings.

My activism did not spring from being black...The racial injustice that was present in this country during my youth was a challenge to my belief in the oneness of the human family.

People will never fight for your freedom if you have not given evidence that you are prepared to fight for it yourself.

The proof that one truly believes is in action.

I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble.

There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.

Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction, those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel's existence.

The organizers and perpetuators of segregation are as much the enemy of America as any foreign invader.

When you're wrong, you're wrong. But when you're right, you're wrong anyhow.

Surely, I must at all times attempt to obey the law of the state. But when the will of God and the will of the state conflict, I am compelled to follow the will of God.

You have to join every other movement for the freedom of people.

Martin Luther King, with whom I worked very closely, became very distressed when a number of the ministers working for him wanted him to dismiss me from his staff because of my homosexuality.

I believe there are certain types of movements which cannot be married.

The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics 2) constitutional means 3) democratic procedures 4) respect for human personality 5) a belief that all people are one.

The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself,