Quotes by Activists - Page 19

Source truth exists in greater abundance outside of the symbolic system of words.
Bryant McGill
Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
Rebecca Solnit
What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.
Rebecca Solnit
There is one clear urgency in your life that you must never neglect, and that is — you must be yourself.
Bryant McGill
‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.
Grace Paley
As a human being you have the right to express yourself. You have the right to journey wherever your mind wanders and to express the thoughts you come up with along the way. You have the right to believe, and to atone, the same way you have the right to love and to hate.
Raif Badawi
Let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons.
Malala Yousafzai
Persecution complexes are reaffirming to those who benefit from unearned privileges.
DaShanne Stokes
Once you connect with yourself, it is impossible to be lonely or desperate.
Bryant McGill
Patience has its limits. Take it too far and it's cowardice.
George Jackson
Rest your mind for a moment in the peace of knowing you were created and you do exist.
Bryant McGill
The world's only lessons are tension and fear — relax into yourself.
Bryant McGill
To be rapable, a position that is social not biological, defines what a woman is.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.
Gloria Steinem
If you are positive, you'll see opportunities instead of obstacles.
Widad Akreyi
I know that life is a doorway to eternity, and yet my heart so often gets lost in petty anxieties. It forgets the great way home that lies before it.
Sophie Scholl
The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news… and it’s not entirely the media’s fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news.
Peter McWilliams
The inability to get something out of your head is a signal that shouts, “Don’t forget to deal with this!” As long as you experience fear or pain with a memory or flashback, there is a lie attached that needs to be confronted. In each healing step, there is a truth to be gathered and a lie to discard.
Christina Enevoldsen
My mind became a sanctuary for secret thoughts of escaping from this household.
Tehmina Durrani
Political correctness’ is a label the privileged often use to distract from their privilege and hate.
DaShanne Stokes
There are times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost. ... When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests and examinations, one's brain becomes encumbered with a lot of bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use. At the present time my mind is so full of heterogeneous matter that I almost despair of ever being able to put it in order. Whenever I enter the region of my mind I feel like the proverbial bull in the china shop. A thousand odds and ends of knowledge come crashing about my head like hailstones, and when I try to escape them, theme goblins and college nixies of all sorts pursue me, until I wish – oh, may I be forgiven the wicked wish! – that I might smash the idols I came to worship.
Helen Keller
There is no such thing as a person without brilliance.
Bryant McGill
The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
Helen Keller
Legionary life is beautiful, not because of riches, partying or the acquisition of luxury, but because of the noble comradeship which binds all Legionaries in a sacred brotherhood of struggle.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
As a powerful creator, your potential success only awaits the genesis of thought.
Bryant McGill
What I spent is gone what I kept I lost but what I gave away will be mine forever.
Ethel Percy Andrus
The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?
Barbara Ehrenreich
The polarization is such that the conservatives on this side have their prayer meeting and their choir meeting. And the liberals on this side have their prayer meeting and their choir meeting, and the two sides never get together and talk about it. The result is the tearing apart of the fabric of the body of Christ.
Walter Wink
Every symbol, word, concept, discipline and field is only a temporary rest stop on the highway of discovery.
Bryant McGill
You learn that the only way to get rock-star power as a girl is to be a groupie and bare your breasts and get chosen for the night. We learn that the only way to get anywhere is through men. And it's a lie.
Kathleen Hanna
My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together— whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.
James Baldwin
Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.
Ossie Davis
When you blame others you are effectively proclaiming that you are only response to stimuli.
Bryant McGill
This very moment is your greatest adventure.
Bryant McGill
No,nobody but nobody can make it out her alone.
Maya Angelou
Once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us like.
Alice Walker
It will be very hard. You’ll make a million mistakes, and you’ll pay for them all, one way or another. But the hard parts will be your parts, they won’t be hard parts other people have imposed on you for their own reasons, or maybe for no reason at all. And your ownership of them – your responsibility to and for them – makes all the difference in the world.
Derrick Jensen
There are many paths beyond the rules of limited thinking. Trust your instincts!
Bryant McGill
Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.
Shane Claiborne
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the worldacknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.
Patrick Califia-Rice
No matter how many toys we amass we leave them behind when we die, just as we leave a broken environment, an economy that only benefits the richest, and a legacy of empowering greed over goodness. It is now time to commit to following a new path.
John Perkins
As in so many cases of sexual abuse within the family, it is much more complicated than had it been done by a stranger.
Erin Merryn
And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.
Maya Angelou
There are as many violent women as men, but there's a lot of money in hating men, particularly in the United States -- millions of dollars. It isn't a politically good idea to threaten the huge budgets for women's refuges by saying that some of the women who go into them aren't total victims.
Erin Pizzey
I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.
Emma Watson
A moment of truth is very powerful. Instead of smiling to be polite, just frown. Instead of laughing when you are nervous or uncomfortable, just speak your truth. Instead of acting like everything is all right, proclaim it isn't alright, and talk about your feelings! Honor your truth. Honor yourself. Be real.
Bryant McGill
In order to deserve, we must pay our dues and steadily work for perfection. We must relish in struggle, and relinquish pride. We must dispel fear and seek enlightenment. We must shun division and honor love. We must know our hearts and seek to understand others. We must try, live, create, feel, grow and love.
Bryant McGill
God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need.
Shane Claiborne
Women of color have no call to trust white women until white women take a gander at the world around them, investigate, learn and annihilate ignorance founded in being white in a society where the perspective and voice presented to the general public is white.
Inga Muscio
Friendship is mutual blackmail elevated to the level of love.
Robin Morgan
The Nature of This Flower is to bloom.
Alice Walker
Crossing the Rubicon of absolute pain is the only journey of purpose and meaning in life.
Bryant McGill
What the United States call democracy is actually a vertical model of remote governance by oligarchs—economic barons and their political representatives. The result is that citizens in the United States have little control over what the U.S. government does.
S. Brian Willson
How can you tell somebody who is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?
Dan Savage
To me, my husband was my son’s murderer. He was also my daughter’s molester. A parasite nibbling on the Holy Book, he was Lucifer, holding me by the throat and driving me to sin every night. He was Bhai’s destroyer, Amma Sain’s tormentor, Ma’s humbler and the people’s exploiter. He was the rapist of orphans and the fiend that fed on the weak. But over and above all this, he was known to be the man closest to Allah, the one who could reach Him and save us.
Tehmina Durrani
Anything you want is just beyond your fear.
Bryant McGill
Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord.
Julia Ward Howe
An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up with more demands because he believes his needs are your responsibility, until you feel drained down to nothing.
Lundy Bancroft
Our receiving expands with our gratitude.
Bryant McGill