11 Quotes by Patrisse Khan-Cullors

I am here, today, a mother and a wife, a community organizer and Queer, an artist and a dreamer learning to find hope while navigating the shadows of hell.

We agree that there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not love, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude, on that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.

There is nothing about you I am not willing to know.

He says he never did find a way to learn how to love himself. We sit with that for a time. What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?That night we speak of prisons and the drug war and how it feels to not seem to matter as a person in the world. He has never been worth saving, never worth treatment.No intervention beyond prison for this Black man from Louisiana.

What is the impact of not being valued?How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?

Being hungry is the hardest thing, & to this day I have prayers of gratitude for the Black Panthers, who made Breakfast for Children a thing that schools should do. We qualified for free lunch & breakfast, & without them I am almost sure we wouldn't have made it out of childhood alive despite my hardworking parents.

We agree there is something that happens inside of a person, a people, a community when you think you will not live, that the people around you will not live. We talk about how you develop an attitude, one that dismisses hope, that discards dreams.

You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn't mean you're not doing life.

Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to out community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that. No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became and institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.