Mary Shelley on the Courage to Speak Up Against Injustice and the Power of Words in Revising the World

“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men*,” the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote in her 1914 anthem against silence — a line Rachel Carson leaned on in summoning her epoch-making courage to speak inconvenient truth to power as she awakened the modern environmental conscience.

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality... what I most regretted were my silences... My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you,” Audre Lorde admonished a generation later

Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on; I never hesitated to use them, when I fought any battle for the miserable and oppressed. People are so afraid to speak, it would seem as if half our fellow-creatures were born with deficient organs; like parrots th... See more

That existence is scarcely to be termed life, which does not bring us into intimate connexion with our fellow-creatures.