Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Davis

Responsibility, here, isn’t a pious feeling; it’s a political ledger. Angela Davis frames “awareness” as the starting point, but the real move is the quiet shift from individual opportunity to collective debt. She’s talking about success as something you don’t privately earn and then privately enjoy. You “take advantage” of opportunities only because someone else fought, organized, suffered, taught, or simply refused to accept the world as it was. The phrase “in a sense” is doing strategic work: it softens the claim just enough to sound reasonable, even as it challenges the most American myth of all - that we are self-made.

The subtext is an argument against gratitude as mere sentiment. Davis is not asking for thank-you notes to history; she’s demanding repayment in the currency of action. “A certain measure” matters too: it rejects both guilt theater and the libertarian fantasy of zero obligations. She’s calibrating responsibility as something scalable and practical - a standard you can live up to, not a purity test you fail.

Context sharpens the intent. Davis emerged from movements where the cost of “making opportunities possible” was incarceration, surveillance, exile, and violence, especially for Black radicals and organizers. So when she says “those who have made it possible,” she’s invoking an intergenerational chain of struggle that polite liberal narratives often sanitize. The line aims at readers who want the benefits of progress without the discomfort of solidarity: if you can access the door, you owe something to the hands that pried it open - and to the people still locked outside.