Cecily McMillan quotes:

I think any person who goes to Rikers is criminalized, even just for visiting. I go back every week to see my friends in there. When you go to see a criminal, you are by relation a criminal and subject to be treated like one.

My town was all-white and shut down Section 8 housing because they didn't want black people to move into the town. And I thought that was wrong - duh.

Jail is just another micro-society. It just happens that here, the problems are far more out in the open, we don't live with the facades of lies that democracy or capitalism creates for us.

I felt like there wasn't a political discourse. I felt like there was just one set of values, and any one set of values was wrong; that there should at least be room for conversation.

I really don't feel good about leaving my house anymore. I don't feel really good about being anywhere in New York City alone anymore.

I had a sense that my mother was struggling, when I was a kid, working twelve hour days, making $12,000 a year with two kids in a trailer park.

I think in short order all of us need to act like we are citizens with not only rights, but also duties.

I can be all pissed off at the oppression of the state, but what does that really mean? Well, it's the tacit consent of a public.

I think that by telling the truth and by attempting to be a good citizen, somehow I've ended up playing with fire. And that's really scary.

I would like to start a discussion about ending solitary confinement. I'd like to start a discussion about the removal of MO wings - an "MO" is a "Mental Observation" inmate - from Rikers Island, to be set up in mental health institutions. You can't put people in jail for having mental disorders.

I cannot speak adequately, especially considering my race and my privilege, to the violence of the NYPD or the police in racial terms. That is something that I cannot speak adequately to.

If somebody is acting maladjusted - which means not happy to be at Rikers - the protocol, as I understand it and have been told by COs unofficially or officially, is to pepper spray that individual to sedate them.

We're just trying to figure out what being a good citizen is, what participating in a democracy is, what taking responsibility for being an American citizen in a global context means to us.

I think the big turning moment was when I joined the student political action club and started studying nonviolent civil disobedience in response to the Iraq War. The first anti-Bush protest in Atlanta was the first protest that I'd ever been to, and I helped organize the school walkout when I was a junior. It was a really solidifying moment.