Quotes by Activists - Page 25

He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.
Cory Doctorow
Remaining aware of awareness, witnessing it thru every experience within without one, is the way and the goal both...Be Happy and keep smiling...
Satish Kumar
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
Audre Lorde
Intolerance is a species of violence and therefore against our creed.
Mahatma Gandhi
People are more than the worst thing they have ever done in their lives.
Helen Prejean
I want a future abortion conversation known for its openness, respect and empathy, so instead of generating more heat, anger and conflict, I practice pro-voice.
Aspen Baker
To misbehave us to denounce the social norms that limit individuals based on who they are. That to make history is to upset patriarchy, a system that is intent on controlling and marginalising others.
Malebo Sephodi
The problem is that, when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.
Anjem Choudary
The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me—all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them—but it had not in me.
Rebecca Solnit
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy
Now I have very little respect for the electoral system in the United States. I could have respected it in the early days, when the country was small and we had small population. The system that we have in the United States was set up at a time when the total population was the population of Tennessee. We've stretched it to try to make it work for different kind of problems and in stretching and adapting it, we've lost its meaning. We still have the form but not the meaning. There's a lot of things that we have to look at critically that might have been useful at one time that are no longer useful I think there's some good in everything. There's some bad in everything. But there's so little good in some things that you know for practical purposes they're useless. They're beyond salvation. There's so much good in some things, even though there's bad, that we build on that.
Myles Horton
I am no worshiper of cloth of any color, but I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists. I have a red flag hanging in my study, and if I could I should gladly march with it past the office of the Times and let all the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle.
Helen Keller
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Audre Lorde
I think all the politicians in Brazil use God. They always present themselves as the defenders of God. This is because power searches for its legitimation starting from God, religious legitimation. (Carlos Mesers, p. 123)
Mev Puleo
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act write speak be I'll be sending messages on a ouija board cryptic complaints from the other side.
Audre Lorde
To be just, a law has to be flexible.
Gloria Steinem
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.
Nelson Mandela
Feminism is a movement for change, not a changing of the guard.
Finn Mackay
Unreasonable self-criticism represents a form of self-hatred and fear.
Bryant McGill
The critic said, but don't you feel awkward about biting the hand that feeds you? I said no, I enjoy just gnawing it up to the shoulder.
Myles Horton
Forgiving is not forgetting. It is actually remembering - remembering and not using your right to hit back
Archbishop Desmont Tutu
Pioneering is never done in front of cheerleaders urging on a roaring grandstand of popular approval.
George Takei
This struggle of people against their conditions this is where you find the meaning in life.
Rose Chernin
For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Nelson Mandela
Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honour them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means.
Arundhati Roy
It drives me crazy who quickly the great ones get canonized. 'Blah-blah-blah is such a terrible loss.' Does that mean that the death of one mediocre slob is not as terrible? Do fags have to be geniuses to justify living?
Sarah Schulman
Violence begins with the fork.
Mahatma Gandhi
The pinnacle of human consciousness must be the rejection of unhealthy competition, war and violence.
Bryant McGill
It is through victims such as myself who still have a voice that the world will change to be a better place.
Catherine Jane Fisher
Allow sunshine and light into your rooms and life!
Bryant McGill
Accept that you can and will do what you must do, to take good care of yourself.
Bryant McGill
What we have most to fear is failure of the heart.
Sonia Johnson
People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
Helen Keller
That's what drives science though: trying to find out the way things are, the way they were, and the way it really works. If that is your goal, then you want to make sure that your information is accurate, and if it's not, then it doesn't matter how much you liked that old urban legend or fictional factoid you once bought into. You will discard it, and be embarrassed by it, seeking instead for truth.
Aron Ra
This question of grades being coercive, and of politics being inherent in teaching, applies not only to writing, but to all fields. Mathematics, science, economics, history, religion, are all just as deeply and necessarily political. To believe they’re not—to believe, for example, that science (or mathematics, economics, history, religion, and so forth: choose your poison) describes the world as it is, rather than acting as a filter that removes all information that does not fit the model and colors the information that remains—is in itself to take a position, one that is all the more powerful and dangerous because it is invisible to the one who holds it.
Derrick Jensen
Love and respect changes everything.
Bryant McGill
The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.
Gloria Steinem
It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...
Rebecca Solnit
Revolution is simple. It's like a breath; out with the old, and in with the new.
Bryant McGill
The revolution of today is the oppression of tomorrow.
Bryant McGill
Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow because science must always test and measure and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable.
Starhawk
Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.
Grace Paley
I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.
Maya Angelou
I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown of my feet by any
Mahatma Gandhi
Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds.
Rebecca Solnit
Without question, the balance of power on the planet today lies in the hands of business. Corporations rival governments in wealth, influence, and power. Indeed, business all too often pulls the strings of government. Competing institutions-religion, the press, even the military-play subordinate roles in much of the world today. If a values-driven approach to business can begin to redirect this vast power toward more constructive ends than the simple accumulation of wealth, the human race and Planet Earth will have a fighting chance.
Ben Cohen
Live with grace and dignity. It's a middle finger to the darkness
Jamie Tworkowski
It's funny how you can know a person, think of him as your closest friend, and still never gain access to the secret chambers in his heart.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Kindness is seen as weakness and intelligence worshiped, even when that intelligence allows unfathomable injustice and suffering to occur under its smart watch.
Bryant McGill
[T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, "The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism.
Rebecca Solnit
Boundaries and risk management are very important parts of living a healthy and positive life.
Bryant McGill
...the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.
Rebecca Solnit
Sometimes I think we can tell how important it is to risk by how dangerous it is to do so.
Sonia Johnson
The ability to take pride in your own work is one of the hallmarks of sanity.
Nikki Giovanni
I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
Helen Keller
The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and reprogrammed.
Kalle Lasn
At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until he saw what his Untouchable son had touched. More than touched.Enter.Loved.
Arundhati Roy
I don’t know any writers who don’t drink.
James Baldwin
The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection...
Rebecca Solnit