Quotes by Activists - Page 13

Life wants you to touch, taste and see the grandeur of the world's unfathomable variety.
Bryant McGill
One of our people in the Native community said the difference between white people and Indians is that Indian people know they are oppressed but don’t feel powerless. White people don’t feel oppressed, but feel powerless. Deconstruct that disempowerment. Part of the mythology that they’ve been teaching you is that you have no power. Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.
Winona LaDuke
When you are well, your own body is a sealed country into which you need not explore far, but when you are unwell, there is no denying that you are made up of organs and fluids and chemistry and that the mechanisms by which your body operates are not invincible.
Rebecca Solnit
I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.
Endesha Ida Mae Holland
When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.
Malala Yousafzai
Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.
Maya Angelou
Every day I get better at knowing that it is not a choice to be an activist; rather, it is the only way to hold on to the better parts of my human self. It is the only way I can live and laugh without guilt.
Staceyann Chin
Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied it is the most potent instrument of action.
Mahatma Gandhi
In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.
Gloria Steinem
If God creates morality, then morality is nothing more than the whimsy of a divine being blindly followed by humans.
Armin Navabi
Each moment of gratitude awareness reveals the total beauty which surrounds you.
Bryant McGill
The only thing that’s been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.
Joan Baez
You are powerful, if you choose to be.
Bryant McGill
- Mr. Berg, Are you an Afrikaner?- Yes-And are you proud of it?-I am not ashamed of it, but I am not proud of it, for in fact I had nothing to do with it.
Alan Paton
Kindness always works with the most important person — YOU. Be kind for you, not others.
Bryant McGill
Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.
Coretta Scott King
Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation
Angela Y. Davis
When I look closely at dairy, I see the hurtful exploitation of specifically female bodies so that some people can enjoy sensual pleasures of consumption while others enjoy the psychological pleasure of collecting profits from the exertions of somebody else's body. Cows are forcibly impregnated, dispossessed of their children, and then painfully robbed of the milk produced by their bodies for those children. No wonder I didn't want to see my complicity! Most women don't consciously perceive the everyday violence against girls and women that permeates and structures our society. How much harder it is, then, to see the gendered violence against nonhuman animals behind the everyday items on the grocery store shelf. When we, as women, partake of that violence, we participate in sexism even as we enjoy the illusory benefits of speciesism. No wonder a glimpse of the sexist violence behind my breakfast cereal left me dizzy.
pattrice jones
Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans, would much rather ignore the fundamental conflict between Islam and their own worldview. This is partly because they generally assume that ‘religion,’ however defined, is a force for good and that any set of religious beliefs should be considered acceptable in a tolerant society. I can sympathize with that. But that does not mean that we should be blind to the potential consequences of accommodating beliefs that are openly hostile to Western laws, traditions, and values. For it is not simply a religion we have to deal with. It is a political religion many of whose fundamental tenets are irreconcilably inimical to our way of life. We need to insist that it is not we in the West who must accommodate ourselves to Muslim sensitivities; it is Muslims who must accommodate themselves to Western liberal ideals.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.This means the when you go to sleep you close your eyes and you are and look like you are dead but then when you wake up it looks like you are reborn because you are up and ready.
Mahatma Gandhi
If you learn to look at the worldly madness through spiritual eyes, you will begin to see divine balance and sanity.
Bryant McGill
Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.
Mahatma Gandhi
Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it. And even then your experience is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and of course, the fact that I have the option to leave. I am allowed to see the ocean.
Rachel Corrie
In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that is what it is—is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils.
James Baldwin
An Act of Dissent is simply a way of saying, 'No, I do not accept this and, as my silence may be construed as acquiescence, I would like to make a small gesture to indicate that you can all go fuck yourselves.
Mark Thomas
what would the masters do?when people arn’t successful, they sometimes wonder, why not? they get answers, then they wonder why those answers don’t seem to meet their needs. they get the wrong answers, and they get upset about it. perhaps they’re really getting the right answers, but answering the wrong questions.too many people ask nothing but “Why” questions.they analyze and analyse problems - but no solution. “you can analyse a glass of water and you’re left with a lot of chemical components, but nothing you can drink”.“Why?” questions can drive us crazy. “What?” questions drive us sane.What questions lead us to practical solutions.
Peter McWilliams
Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.
Rebecca Solnit
To get, simply release, and then gently invite.
Bryant McGill
Discovery requires courage and acceptance that we are not in control, and that the future is uncertain.
Bryant McGill
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
James Baldwin
Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?
Barbara Ehrenreich
Solitude is a catalyst for innovation
Mahatma Gandhi
The outer world is a reflection of our inner selves.
Bryant McGill
The secret is in realizing your internal gifts and then setting them free.
Bryant McGill
Part of why I love these angry, straight, white punks is that they are stripping the dharma of its bullshit, and applying it to contexts and styles that, even if they aren’t mine, are at least different from the norm.
Jay Michaelson
Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.
Alice Walker
Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.
Barbara Ehrenreich
It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.
Masha Gessen
But what was there to say?Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
Arundhati Roy
I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.
Cory Doctorow
Nobody hates us as ourselves. In their minds we're not human... They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us.
Marge Piercy
Inhabitants of urban industrial cultures have no point of contact with grain, chickens, cows, or, for that matter, with topsoil. We have no basis of experience to outweigh the arguments of political vegetarians. We have no idea what plants, animals, or soil eat, or how much. Which means we have no idea what we ourselves are eating.
Lierre Keith
Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.
Maya Angelou
The invitation only world is a manifestation of self-realization.
Bryant McGill
The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.
Russell Brand
I was lonely, desperate, and angry. At that moment, I truly understood what it meant to be a Saudi woman. It meant being confronted with every possible kind ofobstacle and discrimination. It meant being told that if you want to race with men, you’d have to do it with your hands and legs cut off. I started to wish I had been born somewhere—anywhere—else.
Manal Al-Sharif
There is no greater path than the act of listening, because the observer who listens can begin to see themselves as a part of one expression of purpose and beingness.
Bryant McGill
Your uniqueness is the master key that unlocks the hidden treasures of your lifetime.
Bryant McGill
We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was NOT in danger of death?
Elie Wiesel
Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production.
Gloria Steinem
Everything in my environment is offering me feedback, if I will only listen.
Sharon Weil
Just be happy and if you can't be happy, do things that make you happy. or do nothing with the people that make you happy.
Esther Grace Earl
I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
James Baldwin
The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not.
Alice Walker
At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair. For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there any chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing. Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…
Elie Wiesel
Be the patience you seek
Bryant McGill
Deeply-rooted conditioning has perverted us. We ARE the culture of violence. We must look at ourselves.
Bryant McGill
Lovers think quite different thoughtswhile lying side by side.
Maya Angelou
I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined ... imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness.
Audre Lorde
Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?
Arundhati Roy