Quotes by Activists - Page 29

A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. the places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break.Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.
Rebecca Solnit
But even a medicine man like myself has to have some money, because you force me to live in your make-believe world where I can't get along without it.
John Lame Deer
Those who serve a cause are not those who love that cause. They are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it - except in the case of the very purest and they are rare.
Simone Weil
Begin accepting the gift now, and have every beautiful and good thing in life — and then share.
Bryant McGill
Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
Cory Doctorow
That's what "meaning" is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.
Barbara Ehrenreich
A nation lives forever through its concepts, honour, and culture. It is for these reasons that the rulers of nations must judge and act not only on the basis of physical and material interests of the nation but on the basis of the nation's historical honour, of the nation's eternal interests. Thus: not bread at all costs, but honour at all costs.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
Your love for beauty has been perverted, repressed and savaged by hateful and controlling elements in the world.
Bryant McGill
Out of our suffering we emerge. Our struggles are really our only hope.
Bryant McGill
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?The world would split open.
Muriel Rukeyser
No matter what you face, don't forget if you're positive, positivity will find you and embrace you.
Widad Akreyi
Stepping onto a brand-new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation, which is not nurturing to the whole woman.
Maya Angelou
I enjoy my wrinkles and regard them as badges of distinction-I've worked hard for them!
Maggie Kuhn
Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.
Maya Angelou
They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.
Marge Piercy
You are the authority and the gatekeeper of your own life.
Bryant McGill
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.
Nelson Mandela
I am hopeful because love overflows from my heart. Gratitude for beauty and life leads my way.
Bryant McGill
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest it seems is an interest in life good bad or peculiar.
Grace Paley
...it really struck me that, just as people might look at me and never imagine I'd worked as a prostitute, they must look at some of those girls and see only the alienation and disaffection that hides their on fears and hurt.
Sophie Hayes
I quit eating meat in 1976, the same year I turned fifteen, came out, and went to my first gay rights rally (not in that order). When I say that I 'came out,' I mean that I resolved to never lie about my love for women, never deliberately pass for straight, and never deny a lover by calling her 'him.' To do so, I felt, would be to betray not only the women I desired, but my deepest self.My decision to quit meat was equally simple. Somehow, through the confluence of midseventies influences, I knew that vegetarianism was a particularly healthy way to eat. One day, quite suddenly, I realized: If I didn't need to eat meat to stay alive, then eating meat was killing for pleasure. I couldn't live with myself, wouldn't be the nonviolent person I believed myself to be, if I killed other beings--beings who had their own desires--merely to satisfy my desire for the taste of their flesh.Looking back, I see that both decisions, coming out and quitting meat, are about the interplay of desire and integrity. Sometimes integrity means being true to your desires, and sometimes integrity requires you to refuse your desires. I also notice that both decisions were about bodies and consent. A primary tenet of gay liberation is that what consenting people do with each other's bodies is nobody else's business. And, of course, eating meat is something you do to somebody else's body without their consent.
pattrice jones
Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown.
Alice Walker
Should we try to account for all the gifts of life there would be no time for distress and uneasiness.
Bryant McGill
Since the day I decided to become sober and a mother, I've been trying to become who I am supposed to be.
Glennon Doyle Melton
The childhood sexual abuse taught me that my value came from sex. In adulthood, I was driven to have sex since I always felt worthless. I felt important and desired until it was over and then I felt like garbage—the same way I did after the abuse. I desperately needed to feel valued again, which led to more sex. My sex addiction only stopped when I believed that I’m valuable apart from anything I do.
Christina Enevoldsen
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.
Mahatma Gandhi
We criticize and separate ourselves from the process. We've got to jump right in there with both feet.
Dolores Huerta
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.
Rebecca Solnit
We are fighters and survivors. We are here. We are alive and breathing, living and loving, birthing and caring, working and earning. The sky is above us. The earth is below us. We can never be poor. ~ NanaAnna
Sister Souljah
I'm as proud of my inconsistencies as I am my consistencies.
Myles Horton
Stay in the middle of the bell-curve of social norms and follow along, or you will find out the about freedom you never had.
Bryant McGill
When no one is watching Mother Earth, and most of the time no one is, she sings softly to herself. Certainly no one is watching after her, to the point where she's now calling herself M. Earth, using her first initial only, like the early women writers who did not want their work to be automatically dismissed because of their gender disadvantage. Though she is grand, M. Earth is feeling, perhaps, overly feminine, and therefore vulnerable. Don't even mention the word Gaia; it's such a projection! She thinks she could benefit from a more macho profile, a little kick-ass to make her point. Perhaps a little masculine detachment would be helpful, or a thicker skin. Because, frankly, she's been trampled, poisoned, stripped bare, robbed blind, and blamed for just about everything that's come down the pike. And like all mothers, everyone just assumes she'll always be there for them with open, loving arms, and a cup of hot cocoa. That it will be her pleasure to feed them, lick their wounds, and clean a load or two of their dirty laundry. She's looking for a little more respect.
Sharon Weil
Stop aspiring and start being. The world needs you!
Bryant McGill
Thus began a long intimate relationship with God, a true Father, and not some mean guy up in the sky with a hammer. But a caring Father who loved me and had a powerful plan for my life. As I lovingly held my newborn daughter Teresa I realized God loved me like I loved my new baby. Amazing.
Shelley Lubben
Support Gay Liberation the whole way. But forget the practice. Nothing in it but the pain. They can say in public that I'm queer, but that doesn't mean I have to be. Tell the truth––then outwit it in private.
Kate Millett
I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the Highest Source. I salute that Source in you. Let us work together for unity and love.
Mahatma Gandhi
You are lost because you have not been being honest with yourself, and your life is largely unexamined and unexerted.
Bryant McGill
I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.
Alice Walker
But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.
Barbara Ehrenreich
A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.
Rebecca Solnit
She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.
Naomi Wolf
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Further, any way of life based on the importation of resources is also functionally based on violence, because if your way of life requires the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable: if people in the next watershed over won't trade you for some necessary resource, you will take it, because you need it. So, to bring this to the present, we could all become enlightened, and the US military would still have to be huge: how else will they get access to the oil they need to run the economy, oil that just happens to lie under someone else's land? The point is that no matter what we think of the irredeemability of this culture's mass psychology or system of rewards, this culture–civilization–is also irredeemable on a purely functional level.
Aric McBay
Know before whom thou stands. Understand your friends for who they are, not who you wish them to be. Accept them for their flaws as well as their attributes. Turn to them for their strengths, what good stuff they can bring to your life, and forget about the rest. To ask for more only sets you up for failure.
Fran Drescher
The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.
Russell Brand
Declaring our intentions for a safer and kinder world is the obvious first step toward attaining those goals.
Bryant McGill
The central attitudes driving the Water Torturer are:You are crazy. You fly off the handle over nothing.I can easily convince other people that you’re the one who is messed up.As long as I’m calm, you can’t call anything I do abusive, no matter how cruel.I know exactly how to get under your skin.
Lundy Bancroft
You must firmly, absolutely and ruthlessly protect your safety and sanity.
Bryant McGill
I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.
Mahatma Gandhi
Islam influences every aspect of believers’ lives. Women are denied their social and economic rights in the name of Islam, and ignorant women bring up ignorant children. Sons brought up watching their mother being beaten will use violence. Why was it racist to ask this question? Why was it antiracist to indulge people’s attachment to their old ideas and perpetuate this misery? I read the works of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment—Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Mill, Voltaire—and the modern ones, Russell and Popper,with my full attention, not just as a class assignment. All life is problem solving, Popper says. There are no absolutes; progress comes through critical thought. Popper admired Kant and Spinoza but criticized them when he felt their arguments were weak. I wanted to be like Popper: free of constraint, recognizing greatness but unafraid to detect its flaws.Spinoza was clear-minded and fearless. He was the first modern European to state clearly that the world is not ordained by a separate God. Nature created itself, Spinoza said. Reason, not obedience, should guide our lives. Though it took centuries to crumble, the entire ossified cage of European social hierarchy—from kings to serfs, and between men and women, all of it shored up by the Catholic Church—was destroyed by this thought. Now, surely, it was Islam’s turn to be tested.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
Simone Weil
Leadership by deception isn't leadership. It's fraud.
DaShanne Stokes
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened vision cleared ambition inspired and success achieved.
Helen Keller
The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.
Arundhati Roy
There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract but not for the concrete.
Helen Keller
Humanity needs heroic leadership from those who see all life as precious.
Bryant McGill
Our guns were still strapped onto our backs, because a gun meant life. Without it there was no life in the LRA. After crossing the water and walking for a long time, there was a whisper in my heart, telling me that if we kept the guns we would get killed.I was learning to listen to this gentle voice that spoke to my heart. This time what was said was hard to accept. I didn't know how I would convince my friends to throw away what seemed to be their last hope. The voice would not leave me alone. It continued to whisper in my ears to drop the guns.
Grace Akallo
There is little to be said in favour of poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship. Many people will appear to befriend you when you are wealthy, but precious few will do the same when you are poor
Nelson Mandela
Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.
Rebecca Solnit
The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.
Marge Piercy