Political Quotes

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would like to express my outrage and my disappointment at the Oakland, California, Police Department, which reacted with brutality to those peacefully protesting. Mr. Speaker, I want to remind our Nation's law enforcement authorities all across the land that civil disobedience is as American as American pie. It is the act through which our great Nation was conceived. It required great courage to do what they did at the Boston Tea Party. It required great courage for the great American, Henry David Thoreau, to refuse to go to war against Mexico in 1849, an act that gave birth to the anti-war movement that continues today. The equalities that we as Americans enjoy today are the result of those great, courageous Americans that fought for our liberties, Mr. Speaker. The women's suffrage movement went from 1848 to 1920. Generations of courageous women marched, they fasted, and they were arrested. Finally, in 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. It took more than seven decades of civil disobedience to achieve the change that they sought. Let's not forget, Mr. Speaker, that the abolition of slavery, the labor movement and the eradication of child labor, the civil rights movement, and the environmental movement all used civil disobedience as a powerful and peaceful weapon to change laws and to protect all of our liberties.…”