Solidarity Quotes

“If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.”
― Malcom X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.”
― Fred Hampton, I Am A Revolutionary: Fred Hampton Speaks

“They want us to be afraid.
They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes.
They want us to barricade our doors
and hide our children.
Their aim is to make us fear life itself!
They want us to hate.
They want us to hate 'the other'.
They want us to practice aggression
and perfect antagonism.
Their aim is to divide us all!
They want us to be inhuman.
They want us to throw out our kindness.
They want us to bury our love
and burn our hope.
Their aim is to take all our light!
They think their bricked walls
will separate us.
They think their damned bombs
will defeat us.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that my soul and your soul are old friends.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that when they cut you I bleed.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that we will never be afraid,
we will never hate
and we will never be silent
for life is ours!”
― Kamand Kojouri

“ESTRAGON: Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!
VLADIMIR: Did I ever leave you?
ESTRAGON: You let me go.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“We don’t think you fight fire with fire best ; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.”
― Fred Hampton

“While we are threading our way through the vagaries of life, our shortage of reciprocity and solidarity may corner us into breaches of culpability. We can eschew this and kindle a dream of universalism that does not impose itself but emerges from the world's numerous cultural and topical particularities and enable us to compare, discern, and identify, allowing us to marvel at the diversity. In this way, we can embrace universal recognition, human understanding, peace of mind, and compassion with others and with ourselves. ("I only needed a light ")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“No daylight to separate us.

Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“سأظل واقفًا مع الطرف الذي يدين القمع وقتل المدنيين وضربهم وإهانة النساء حتى ولو وقف الكون كله في الطرف الذي يدين الضحايا ويتملق الجلادين”
― بلال فضل

“As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer.”
― bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

“It's not surprising, I don't think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews. Here is love born of pain, if the past century's most horrific crime, love of one's own spread outward into love of another. Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own, that love for one’s people may never become love for another.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The problem is politics is made a sport, almost as much a sport as football or baseball. When it comes to politics, adults and politicians do more finger-pointing and play more games than children ever do. Too often are we rooting for the pride of a team rather than the good of the nation.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impassable with our bodies the corridors to the gas chamber. For if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
― James Baldwin

“Sometimes an alien would stand with a moose, not because of solidarity, but because of accidentally doing it.”
― Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee

“To acknowledge the existence of the bully and his accompanying risks is not the same as accepting him as a permanent feature of our world. I know that if we accept trauma and fear, it wins.

"Bullies don’t just go away. Their legacies don’t just disappear. The bully must be confronted intentionally, his impact named and addressed. Even so, it seems there’s no clear consensus on how to deal with the bully on our blocks. Do we confront him? Match violence with violence? Do we ignore him, or try to kill him with kindness? I don’t think there’s a silver bullet to handling the bully, no one-size-fits-all strategy. But the right strategy has to be rooted in a context bigger than the immediate one, has to be rooted in more than aiming to end the presence of the bully himself. We must focus on the type of world we want to live in and devise a plan for getting there, as opposed to devising a strategy centered on opposition.”
― DeRay McKesson, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope

“The oppressor shows solidarity with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labour — when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Comradeship, dignity, amorosity, love, solidarity, fraternity, friendship, ethics: all these names stand in contrast to the commodified, monetised relations of capitalism, all describe relations developed in struggles against capitalism and which can be seen as anticipating or creating a society beyond capitalism.”
― John Holloway, Crack Capitalism

“Languages connect us and break down barriers when we unite to nurture the best in us and help each other succeed. Happy International Mother Language Day!”
― Widad Akreyi

“Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations.”
― Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

“Entre pauvres gens, faut bien qu'on s'aide ... C'est les grands qui font la guerre.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“A hand fought best when it made a fist.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“Solidarity is something much more than mercy: usually when you appease your conscience (donate money to starving children in Africa, to use the usual Starbucks example), you can go on with your daily life as if nothing really happened. However, once you are enacting solidarity you can even abstain from charity or mercy: even if you don’t give a dollar to every beggar, you can’t go on with your daily life as if nothing really happened. Why? Because you carry him in your life; you live with him not like with some “integrated reject” (as we live with immigrants or refugees today), but he is a part and even a presupposition for your very action: he can never be fully integrated, because injustice can’t be integrated in acts of love. This is why solidarity already contains love.”
― Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love

“If solidarity is unity of purpose or togetherness, how to span this great divide of inequality, privilege, universal rights, political agency, and even our seeing things completely differently?
In constructing this great bridge of international solidarity across the globe, where do we even begin?”
― Ramor Ryan, Zapatista Spring: Anatomy of a Rebel Water Project & the Lessons of International Solidarity

“It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Together we are stronger than those who would tear us apart.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“The land is a festival of the vanquished and we are among them”
― Mahmoud Darwish, جدارية

“We do not expose girls. We expose the men who counted on their silence. Reputation is not innocence. Proof will follow.”
― Jean Thesquare, Re:Claim: A Sultryverse Story

“[The Flower Seller of Arequipa]

On a refreshing spring evening,
while wandering through the city of Arequipa in Peru,
I met a young Venezuelan
in the heart of the city.
From his eyes,
his greeting,
and the kindness of his spirit,
I knew at once
that he was homeless, like me.
I knew he came
from one of those countries
to which they had done
what they did
to Iraq,
Syria,
Libya,
Yemen,
and the list goes on,
growing longer
and more painful.
After a long conversation,
in which we exchanged stories
about attempts to plunder our countries
and scatter us across the world,
we stopped before a Peruvian flower seller
who had spread her flowers
on a simple mat
along the pavement.
She was a woman
in her late forties,
perhaps younger.
Time, after all,
is harsher on those
who struggle
for every mouthful of food
and every sip of water.
I greeted her in Spanish
and, picking up a bouquet,
said jokingly:
“May I buy these
at the local price,
rather than the tourist price?”
The flower seller smiled.
And through my new Venezuelan friend,
who translated her words into English,
she replied:
“Flowers are beyond price,
dear visitor.
If poverty and injustice
did not exist
in my country
and in the world,
I would not sell flowers at all.
I would give them freely
to every passerby.
And that is precisely why
I sell them as cheaply as I can.
Not because flowers are cheap,
but because I believe
every human being
deserves a bouquet of flowers.”
Her words touched me deeply.
So I asked her
what flowers meant to her.
She answered
in a gentle voice:
“Flowers sadden me
as much as they delight me.
They sadden me
because I know
that most people in this world
are like flower buds,
stifled by circumstance,
never allowed to bloom.
And they delight me
because their fragrance endures,
even after our harsh hands
have cut them.
Flowers, like all that is precious,
are mortal.
They taught me
that mortality itself
is what makes natural beauty
so beautiful.”
Before I parted
from that kind flower seller,
she asked me in turn
why I loved flowers.
I said:
“I owe flowers
everything I know
and every step
I have taken in life.
And as an Iraqi,
I have always dreamed
that we might plant flowers
for one another
instead of landmines.”
At that,
she placed a bouquet
in my hands
and embraced me warmly.
I then gave the bouquet
to the kind Venezuelan guy,
and in my heart
cursed those responsible
for the impoverishment
and displacement
of millions
of good and gentle souls
throughout the world.
And I thanked fate
for a precious human moment
that could never have happened
without a love of flowers.

21 September 2023”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]