Quotes by Activists - Page 28

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment.
Mahatma Gandhi
Changing yourself changes everything.
Bryant McGill
I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.
Derrick Jensen
Innocence still lives within our hearts and the child within each of us knows right from wrong.
Bryant McGill
She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.
James Baldwin
But somehow, once you start playing behind the steering wheel of God, you realize just how powerful it is to be the imagination driving the natural world (64).
Kola Boof
Always choose to trust yourself and your ability to listen.
Bryant McGill
I couldn't possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!
Russell Brand
People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.
Maya Angelou
Why do you pray?" he asked me, after a moment. Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?"I don't know why," I said, even more disturbed and ill at ease. "I don't know why."After that day I saw him often. He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him," he was fond of repeating. "That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!" "And why do you pray, Moshe?" I asked him. "I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.
Elie Wiesel
Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of women of Color to educated white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.
Audre Lorde
Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it we can never do anything wise in this world.
Helen Keller
Take chances make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.
Mary Tyler Moore
Peace is the respect for the rights of the other person.
Gioconda Belli
...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.
James Baldwin
There's a hard law, mejuffrou, that when a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.
Alan Paton
John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it.
Lierre Keith
Discrimination does not 'make America great.' It makes America weak.
DaShanne Stokes
Be the love you seek.
Bryant McGill
Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
Elie Wiesel
I long to accomplish a great and noble task but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
Helen Keller
read thousands of books and I will power myself with knowledge. Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism.
Malala Yousafzai
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
James Baldwin
If I had spoken to him out loud, he would have understood the tragic fate of those who came back, left over, living dead. You must look at them carefully. Their appearance is deceptive. They are smugglers. They look like the others. They eat, they laugh, they love. The seek money, fame, love. Like the other. But it isn't true; they are playing, sometimes without even knowing it. Anyone who has seen what THEY have seen cannot be like the others, cannot laugh, love, pray, bargain, suffer, have fun, or forget. Like the others. You have to watch them carefully when they pass by an innocent-looking smokestack, or when they lift a piece of bread to their mouths. Something in them shudders and makes you turn your eyes away. These people have been amputated; they haven't lost their legs or eyes, but their will and their taste for life. The things they have seen will come to the surface again sooner or later. And then the world will be frightened and won't dare look these spiritual cripples in the eye.
Elie Wiesel
If it ran, a Bean would shoot it. If it fell, a Bean would eat it.
Carolyn Chute
When the dark clouds of doubt, anger or worry begin to move upon you, steady yourself in the knowledge that in time, the storm will pass.
Bryant McGill
The only way out of your problems is straight through them.
Bryant McGill
The best practice is to be around people who absolutely disagree. Grace in conflict is a study in love.
Bryant McGill
Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.
Jane Jacobs
I can never do justice to the great feeling of amazement and encouragement I felt when, perhaps for the first time in American history, white citizens of a Southern state banded together to come to Selma and show their indignation about the injustices against the African-Americans.
Amelia Boynton Robinson
He laughed a lot, but as a boy he had been so self-conscious about being dark-skinned that he went to the fields to get buffalo milk to spread on his face, thinking it would make him lighter. It was only when he met my mother that he became comfortable in his own skin. Being loved by such a beautiful girl gave him confidence.
Malala Yousafzai
Kids don't always stop to judge or analyze a new experience unless the adults around them react strongly. Otherwise, they just take in the experience and move on to the next one.
Martin Sheen
What is a Communist? One who hath yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings Idler or bungler or both he is willing To fork out his copper and pocket your shilling.
Ebenezer Elliott
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
Audre Lorde
While I live my life expecting to live, others expect that they might die. The rules of the world are not the same for all of us.
Jessica Posner
Literature is my utopia.
Helen Keller
Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation.Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel.Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world.It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation.
Peter Joseph
The Google self and the Facebook self, in other words, are pretty different people. There's a big difference between "you are what you click" and "you are what you share.
Eli Pariser
If you want to be the best, be the best, if you are not the best, pretend you are
Muhhamad Ali
Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
Gloria Steinem
TV is a pornographic cacophony of violence, death obsession, screams, gunfire and drama. You think it's fine because you are damaged.
Bryant McGill
You will need to stay calm as you witness the candy floss in your daughter’s smile harden into brittle bitchiness. You will need to muster a new resolve as your son’s fascination with Pokémon shifts to porn. You will have to recalibrate your mothering instinct to accommodate the notion that not only do your children poop and burp, they also masturbate, drink and smoke. As their bodies, brains and worlds rearrange themselves, you will need to do your own reshuffling. You will come to see that, though you gave them life, they’re the ones who’ve got a life. They’ve got 1700 friends on Facebook. They’ve got YouTube accounts (with hundreds of sub- scribers), endless social arrangements, concerts, Valentine’s Day dances and Halloween parties. What we have – if we’re lucky – is a ‘Thanks for the ride, Mum, don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ as they slam the car door and indicate we can run along now.
Joanne Fedler
Someone, somewhere, needs to take courage to break the cycle of violence. Forgiveness is superior to justice. Being kind and compassionate to those who are good to you is easy. True forgiveness and compassion come only when one is able to forgive even those who have committed barbaric acts. If Angulimala is capable of renouncing violence, then tell me, your Majesty: is your civilized society also capable of being truly civilized and renouncing violence?
Satish Kumar
Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
Naomi Wolf
Excellence in health means devoting your life to ending poverty.
Patch Adams
For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn't allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad.
Rebecca Walker
Real humility is graceful power, not a mandate to be victimized and abused.
Bryant McGill
The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses.
Barbara Ehrenreich
So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.
Helen Keller
A goal that is not written is not a goal. It only becomes real when you write it down.
Bryant McGill
But what was good tween us must have been nothing but bodies, she say. Cause I don't know the Albert that don't dance, can't hardly laugh, never talk bout nothing, beat you and hid your sister Nettie's letters. Who he?
Alice Walker
I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don’t think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.
Hyeonseo Lee
Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Trust your brain to suggest a solution, then have the courage to follow through.
Maya Angelou
The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places. (p 57)
Bryant McGill
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.
Mahatma Gandhi
Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.
DaShanne Stokes
Your life was meant for more than being a life-long doormat for deadbeats, losers, gossipers, nay-sayers, dream-crushers, energy vampires, users, abusers, ragers and passive-aggressive backstabbers.
Bryant McGill
What we want for others doesn't work unless they want it for themselves.
Bryant McGill
I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.
Rebecca Solnit