mario savio

Mario Savio (December 8, 1942 - November 6, 1996) was an American political activist. The son of a factory worker, Savio grew up in New York City and attended Manhattan College and Queens College before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley as a philosophy major in 1963. In March of the following year, he was arrested for demonstrating against the San Francisco Hotel Association for excluding blacks from non-menial jobs; in the summer he traveled to Mississippi as a civil rights worker, helping African Americans register to vote. Savio rose to prominence as a leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, delivering a fiery speech in Sproul Plaza on December 2, 1964. But Savio was not a fame-seeker and took modest jobs for twenty years before returning to college in the 1980s, this time at San Francisco State University, where he received a summa cum laude bachelor's degree and a master's degree in physics. At the time of his death, he was on the faculty of Sonoma State University teaching mathematics and philosophy.

Quotes

On free speech: "To me, freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is...It is the thing that marks us as just below the angels."

"If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received, from a well-meaning liberal, was the following: he said, 'Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?' That's the answer! Well I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees! And we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!"

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

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