Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Davis

The line is defense as strategy: Angela Davis opening with a preemptive correction, narrowing the frame before anyone else can. "First of all" signals she knows the script that follows any talk of prison abolition - the eye-roll, the straw man, the breathless "So you want to let everyone out?" She meets that reflex head-on, not by retreating from the critique but by refusing the lazy version of it.

The phrasing is deliberately modest. "I didn't suggest" shifts attention from policy fantasy to what was actually argued, a reminder that abolitionist thinking is often caricatured into a single, sensational demand. "Simply" is doing heavy lifting: it concedes complexity without conceding the premise. Davis is insisting that the conversation is not about pulling a lever and watching cages vanish; it's about dismantling a system that has been naturalized as the default solution to social harm.

In Davis's context - decades of work on the prison-industrial complex, the afterlives of slavery, and the racialized mechanics of punishment - the subtext is sharper: prisons persist not because they're effective, but because they're politically convenient and economically entrenched. The quote works because it exposes how debate is policed. Before you can argue about safety, you have to fight over vocabulary, over what counts as "realistic", over who gets to sound reasonable. Davis uses that first sentence to pry open space for the larger claim: if prisons are the only imaginable tool, imagination itself has been captured.