Quotes by Activists - Page 21

As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaidlabor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved.
Silvia Federici
When we allow the genius of simple nature to flow through us we become every genius who has ever lived.
Bryant McGill
Let us pick up our books and our pens,” I said. “They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.
Malala Yousafzai
The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer.
Mahatma Gandhi
Ambition can form an impenetrable barrier for those who fail to acknowledge what they already are.
Bryant McGill
I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.
Gloria Steinem
I do not know very much about painting, but I know enough to know that the Art Teacher did not know much about it either and that, furthermore, she did not know or care anything at all about the way in which you can destroy a human being. Stephen, in many ways already dying, died a second and third and fourth and final death before her anger.
Jonathan Kozol
Life has not taught me to expect nothing but she has taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors.
Alan Paton
It takes compassion to truly understand another person.
David Kaczynski
If you want meaning in your life you must give your life meaning.
Bryant McGill
Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.
Bryant McGill
The tides of change have great purpose in our lives.
Bryant McGill
Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our "beauty" so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.
Naomi Wolf
This is why homophobia is a terrible evil: it disguises itself as concern while it is inherently hate.
Tyler Oakley
A certain person wondered whya big strong girl like mewouldn't keep a jobwhich paid a normal salary.I took my time to lead herand to read her every page.Even minimal peoplecan't survive on minimal wage.A certain person wondered whyI wait all week for you.I didn't have the wordsto describe just what you do.I said you had the motionof the ocean in your walk,and when you solve my riddlesyou don't even have to talk.
Maya Angelou
I've fought for religious freedom and I can tell you that anti-gay 'religious freedom' bills aren't it.
DaShanne Stokes
Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)
Arundhati Roy
Pain is the root of knowledge.
Simone Weil
You are not really free, and that is why you do not know what I am talking about.
Bryant McGill
Start deep within yourself and slowly build outward toward your goal.
Bryant McGill
What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
Cory Doctorow
The mythology of freedom under capitalism for the average person is a con job.
Bryant McGill
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
Audre Lorde
Companies' motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values.
Russell Brand
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.
Maya Angelou
Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about.
Rebecca Solnit
Beware! Success is not what you think it is. It's a trap.
Bryant McGill
The central attitudes driving the Player are:Women were put on this earth to have sex with men—especially me.Women who want sex are too loose, and women who refuse sex are too uptight. (!)It’s not my fault that women find me irresistible. (This is a word-for-word quotation from a number of my clients.) It’s not fair to expect me to refuse temptation when it’s all around me; women seduce me sometimes, and I can’t help it.If you act like you need anything from me, I am going to ignore you. I’m in this relationship when it’s convenient for me and when I feel like it.Women who want the nonsexual aspects of themselves appreciated are bitches.If you could meet my sexual needs, I wouldn’t have to turn to other women.
Lundy Bancroft
I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect.
Mahatma Gandhi
IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.
Lundy Bancroft
You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. -John 8: 32
Shelley Lubben
If you can do nothing else, do whatever is in your power to make the people in your life feel completely unashamed of who they are.
Sam Killermann
It’s a journey and the sad thing is you only learn from experience, so as much as someone can tell you things, you have to go out there and make your own mistakes in order to learn.
Emma Watson
Like anybody, I would like to have a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Our experience of the governments of the world, our knowledge of the weapons at their disposal, and our awareness of our own limitations justify pessimism. But some mysterious factor deep in the human psyche has produced a countervailing conviction that educating, organizing, uniting, and acting will make a difference.
David T. Dellinger
We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?
Betty Friedan
We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.
Marge Piercy
It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
Helen Keller
Love is the compass which keeps every other value from becoming lost.
Bryant McGill
What is a human but a choice maker? Choices are powerful. Choices change history. Choices change the world. Remember your power!
Bryant McGill
We are our own worst enemy and make no mistake we are destroying ourselves.
Bryant McGill
Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
James Baldwin
I don't want other people to decide what I am. I want to decide that for myself.
Emma Watson
Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.
Gloria Steinem
We must speak truth to power and confront ignorance with facts.
DaShanne Stokes
The fish does not know it is wet. America is immersed in violence. The violence is in our souls. The enemy is within.
Bryant McGill
I have sometimes said to a client: “If you are so in touch with your feelings from your abusive childhood, then you should know what abuse feels like. You should be able to remember how miserable it was to be cut down to nothing, to be put in fear, to be told that the abuse is your own fault. You should be less likely to abuse a woman, not more so, from having been through it.” Once I make this point, he generally stops mentioning his terrible childhood; he only wants to draw attention to it if it’s an excuse to stay the same, not if it’s a reason to change.
Lundy Bancroft
The more one has engaged in a particular pattern of thought, the more difficult it becomes to override these habitual patterns.
Bryant McGill
Accepting our pain is a way to say we treasure the sacred gift of life — run to your pain.
Bryant McGill
A person could last a long while without touch, but once someone had experienced the comfort, joy, and sheer relief of another human body close, the desire to experience that again was hard to deny.
Mary Johnson
Empowerment comes from self-realization and recognition of our internal gifts, which we already have.
Bryant McGill
Recognize that you are enough, and that all external gifts are simply extra blessings.
Bryant McGill
Expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.become a strangerTo need of pityOr, if compassion be freelyGiven outTake only enoughStop short of urge to pleadThen purge away the need.Wish for nothing largerThan your own small heartOr greater than a star;Tame wild disappointmentWith caress unmoved and coldMake of it a parkaFor your soul.Discover the reason whySo tiny human midgetExists at allSo scared unwiseBut expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.
Alice Walker
The sweet pleasure of your own joy and success is a cultivation of both the heart and mind.
Bryant McGill
If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.
Peter Joseph
We are all instruments pulling the bows across our own lungs. Windmills, still startling in every storm. Have you ever seen a newborn blinking at the light? I wanna do that every day. I wanna know what the kite called itself when it got away, when it escaped into the night...
Andrea Gibson
The ignoramus crow of "love it or leave it" omits other viable options, such as staying and changing it.
Bryant McGill
When people run out of probable things to do, they do improbable things.
Joseph Hansen
Life is a broken thing. It's what we do with the pieces that defines us.
Corban Addison