Quotes by Activists - Page 15

There is no evidence to suggest that God helps people. There is, however, ample evidence that people can help themselves and each other.
Armin Navabi
The flow of the movement of change will be impeded wherever healing has not occurred.
Sharon Weil
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.
Alice Walker
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Perception meets you at the intersection of your beliefs and reality.
Bryant McGill
When an actor reaches down into his emotional well and pulls up a deeply personal response, the audience can sense something special is going on. They may not know exactly what they're seeing, but they recognize it as authentic.
Martin Sheen
You are creating through your choices, even now. Choose wisely.
Bryant McGill
You should never have a relationship based on guilt over someone's poor choices.
Bryant McGill
Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
Audre Lorde
She is trying to be brave, but no one knows what brave looks like inside this particular moment.
Glennon Doyle Melton
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
Audre Lorde
Within the moment of now, there is presence of ever there, As It is;, Invisible; Nothingness; of Still and silent awareness; in substratum; witnessing itself which U in real R...It has nothing to do with Your mind, Your body appearance and Your world...Wisdom is to let it recognize and and realize itself...Often in Ignorance of IT, ignorant start believing "In the Moment", "As It Is" words, which point towards IT (awareness), ignorantly for the appearing body, appearing mind and appearing creation...Be Happy and Keep Smiling...
Satish Kumar
Love only serves and does not calculate. Love gives without expectation, while hate carries an endless tally of debts. Hate controls everything it touches, but love sets everything it touches free.
Bryant McGill
All problems begin when we start worrying what others think of us.
Bryant McGill
I felt like I needed to comfort both the little girl inside me and my mother, assuring them that neither of them could have prevented the rape. I didn't want my mother to blame herself and I didn't want to blame the little girl inside of me for not speaking up at the age of six.
Erin Merryn
She was so upset about a blog that maybe a total of six people read yet had no compassion for her granddaughters who had suffered the physical and emotional pains of sexual abuse and whose lives were changed forever. The two cannot even be compared, yet when someone is in denial about what happened, they cannot perceive what is true. It seemed too hard for her to let her mind go there and believe her grandson could do such terrible things.
Erin Merryn
Life is the first gift love is the second and understanding the third.
Marge Piercy
No labourer in the world is expected to work for room board and love -except the housewife.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Since the human mind is the primary weapon of the human being, it is also therefore the primary and most significant instrument of violence.
Bryant McGill
Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.
Bernadette Devlin
What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.
Barbara Ehrenreich
We teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.
Gloria Steinem
To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.
Rebecca Solnit
In order to validate our Africanness, we hold on to tradition at all cost, banning critical engagement in an attempt to preserve its sacredness
Malebo Sephodi
Spirituality is like a thin-thin thread, that if delicately followed guides us from darkness to light; from poverty to abundance and from destruction to safety.
Bryant McGill
Whenever you are confronted with an opponent conquer him with love.
Mahatma Gandhi
I have no doubt that Jesus would actually practice the neighborliness he preached rather than following our example of religious supremacy, hostility, fear, isolation, misinformation, exclusion, or demonization.
Brian D. McLaren
This world is white no longer and it will never be white again.
James Baldwin
Inner-calm will lead you on a beautiful journey back to your original self; the perfect, beautiful you.
Bryant McGill
Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.
Maya Angelou
Guilt can interfere with our desires to move forward, to heal properly and to become a person who has the mental health and means of proper recompense.
Bryant McGill
You need not strive to become your greater purpose.
Bryant McGill
We were born in the mist of time on this land together with the oaks and fir trees. We are bound to it not only by the bread and existence it furnishes us as we toil on it, but also by all the bones of our ancestors who sleep in its ground. All our parents are here. All our memories, all our war-like glory, all our history here, in this land lies buried. . . . By what right do the Jews wish to take this land from us? On what historical argument do they base their pretensions and particularly the audacity with which they defy us Romanians, here in our own land? We are bound to this land by millions of tombs and millions of unseen threads that only our soul feels, and woe to those who shall try to snatch us from it.
Corneliu Codreanu
How many more times would I have embraced him that night, how many more times would I have kissed him, if I had known the name of that stranger lover who was already in Montreal, who had already bought his stadium ticket from a scalper for the 5,000 tomorrow. That implacable lover who was going to turn Billy's eyes away from me forever.
Patricia Nell Warren
When bad things happen to men we say it’s terrible, but when bad things happen to women we say that’s just a cultural practice,” says Lou de Baca, U.S. Ambassador at Large, Office to Combat and Monitor Human Trafficking.
Nita Belles
I urge you to be teachers so that you can join with children as the co-collaborators in a plot to build a little place of ecstasy and poetry and gentle joy
Jonathan Kozol
There would be nothing to frighten you if you refused to be afraid.
Mahatma Gandhi
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
Maya Angelou
Every mother should endeavor to be a true artist. I do not mean by this that every woman should be a painter, sculptor, musician, poet, or writer, but the artist who will write on the table of childish innocence thoughts she will not blush to see read in the light of eternity and printed amid the archives of heaven, that the young may learn to wear them as amulets around their hearts and throw them as bulwarks around their lives, and that in the hour of temptation and trial the voices from home may linger around their paths as angels of guidance, around their steps, and be incentives to deeds of high and holy worth.
Frances E. W. Harper
Now I realized that life supplies us with everything we need for the journey. Everything I had acquired either actively or passively, everything I had learned either voluntarily or by osmosis, was coming back to me as the real riches of my life, even though I had lost everything.
Ingrid Betancourt
Oddly, I had never thought of myself as a feminist. I had been denounced by certain radical feminist collectives as a ‘lackey’ for men. That charge was based on my having written and sung two albums of songs that my female accusers claimed elevated and praised men. Resenting that label, I had joined the majority of black women in America in denouncing feminism… . The feminists were right. The value of my life had been obliterated as much by being female as by being black and poor. Racism and sexism in America were equal partners in my oppression.
Elaine Brown
Any aggressive lust lacks balance and is unwholesome and obstructive.
Bryant McGill
The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it's a temporary and local place...
Rebecca Solnit
Intelligence is often worshiped, even when that intelligence allows unfathomable injustice and suffering to occur under its smart watch.
Bryant McGill
We must look for the opportunity in every difficulty instead of being paralyzed at the thought of the difficulty in every opportunity.
Walter E. Cole
Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible ManI am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage.i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.
Ishmael Reed
You are likely the greatest obstacle to achieving your own dreams.
Bryant McGill
We must not... ignore the small daily differences we can make which over time add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.
Marian Wright Edelman
All life on earth is inextricably bound together in a web of mutual interdependence.
Marjorie Spiegel
Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat for it is momen
Mahatma Gandhi
Want is small and will make you small. Want is needy and will make you needy.
Bryant McGill
The voice of a Black woman should always be HERSELF ...No edits - no erasure - no pressure - no expectations - no additions - no intruders
Malebo Sephodi
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Mahatma Gandhi
Stop being so greedy, and so selfish. Realize that there is more to the world than your big houses and fancy stores. People are starving and you worry about oil for your cars. Babies are dying of thirst and you search the fashion pages for the latest styles. Nations like ours are drowing in poverty, but your people don't even hear our cries for help. You shut your ears to the voices of those who try to tell you these things. You label them radicals or Communists. You must open your hearts to the poor and downtrodden, instead of driving them further into poverty and servitude. There's not much time left. If you don't change, you're doomed.
John Perkins
You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.
Alice Walker
We’re naked under our clothes; we both know what it’s like to need to fart and hold it in, or not be able to get a hard-on, or worry that a bloke across the room might be looking at your bird and you might have to fight him but he looks well hard.
Russell Brand
Everything comes by being! Be the love you seek. Be the friend you seek. Be the lover you seek. Be the honesty you seek. Be the integrity you seek.
Bryant McGill
I realize how depraved it was to instill false guilt in an innocent child's conscience, causing a distorted image of life, God, & self, leaving little if any feeling of personal worth.
Mary Griffith