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Toni Cade Bambara 3
author, activist, professor 1939–1995Related quotes

Carl MacDougall, "Reformers and radicals in Scottish literature" http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/learning_journeys/reformers_and_radicals/.
Criticism

“The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.”
Writing and Being (1991)
Context: Camus dealt with the question best. He said that he liked individuals who take sides more than literatures that do. 'One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.' So Camus called for 'Courage in and talent in one's work.' And Márquez redefined tender fiction thus: The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.
I believe that these two statements might be the credo for all of us who write. They do not resolve the conflicts that have come, and will continue to come, to contemporary writers. But they state plainly an honest possibility of doing so, they turn the face of the writer squarely to her and his existence, the reason to be, as a writer, and the reason to be, as a responsible human, acting, like any other, within a social context.

"To American Aims," http://books.google.com/books?id=7U4EAAAAMBAJ&q=%22With+the+supermarket+as+our+temple+and+the+singing+commercial+as+our+litany+are+we+likely+to+fire+the+world+with+an+irresistible+vision+of+America's+exalted+purposes+and+inspiring+way+of+life%22&pg=PA97#v=onepage Life magazine (30 May 1960)

Words to Intellectuals (1961)

1790s, First Principles of Government (1795)
Context: It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Address to Latin American diplomats at the White House (13 March 1962) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9100&st=&st1=
1962

As quoted in "Living legend : Ba Jin" in News Guangdong (26 November 2003) http://www.newsgd.com/culture/art/200311260025.htm

“There are no other alternatives; either a socialist revolution or a make-believe revolution.”
Message to the Tricontinental (1967)