Quotes by Activists - Page 3

Faith reminds us that change is always possible.
Jim Wallis
Mindfulness is that space where you are in touch with life-experience and you are brightly aware.
Bryant McGill
When we oppose oppression, we lift our hands from the collective reins that empower such oppression.
Bryant McGill
A winner is a dreamer who never gives up.
Nelson Mandela
We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
Maya Angelou
My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers.
Grace Paley
Being told you are wrong or insulted, gives you an opportunity to practice decency and having a non-response internally.
Bryant McGill
I don't recognize her. This is not the woman I knew so round and made-up with her hair always a wavy jet black! I stay back until she opens her arms to me - this strange and familiar woman - her voice hoarse, "¡Ay mi'jita!" Instinctively, I run into her arms, still holding back my insides. "Don't cry. Don't cry", I remember. "Whatever you do, no llores." But my tía had not warned me about the smell, the unmistakable smell of the woman, mi mamá, el olor de aceite y jabón and comfort and home. "Mi mamá." And when I catch the smell I am lost in tears, deep long tears that come when you have held your breath for centuries.
Cherríe L. Moraga
No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker
If you have had a bad day, remember that tomorrow is a wonderful gift and a new chance to try again.
Bryant McGill
When you truly face your pain you will only see yourself. Your fear was always you.
Bryant McGill
God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed.
Simone Weil
Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.
James Baldwin
The success of a civil order should not be judged by its most affluent members, but by the standard of living of its poor.
Bryant McGill
Self-love for me means accepting who I am and dealing with the perceived flaws that I live with. It is also accepting that sometimes I struggle with feelings of inadequacy and I do not think that I am enough. The point to all of this, is acknowledging this part about me. When I acknowledge it then it becomes easy for me to seek self-love through managing the moments when I don’t feel like I love myself. I am constantly working towards finding ways that enable me to value myself.
Malebo Sephodi
It is impossible to have a healthy and sound society without a proper respect for the soil.
Peter Maurin
Governments are committed to preserving the myth of their monopoly on violence. Violence belongs to everyone.
Bryant McGill
Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.
Andrea Dworkin
Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room. You is in the Word or you ain't--ain't no halfway with God.
James Baldwin
I forget, because it’s hard to realize that the same person who gives you so much love, and to whom you give so much in return, can go through the kinds of pain and suffering that nothing you do can alleviate.
Esther Earl
My politics is my religion, my religion is my politics.
Mahatma Gandhi
I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don't pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It's not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn't that I blow five bucks at Wendy's. It's that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. There's a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there's money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.
Linda Tirado
If you are rude, cynical, habitually-sarcastic or pessimistic, your life options are going to be very limited.
Bryant McGill
But apparently you don't need dot-com wealth to ruin an area for its low-income residents. The Pioneer Press quotes Secretary of HUD Andrew Cuomo ruing the "cruel irony" that prosperity is shrinking the stock of affordable housing nationwide: "The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work-the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again- and because genies don't go back into bottles and queer people are not going back into the closet and women aren't going to surrender. It's a war, but I don't believe we're losing it, even if we won't win it anytime soon either; rather, some battles are won, some are engaged, and some women are doing really well while others suffer. And things continue to change in interesting and sometimes even auspicious ways.
Rebecca Solnit
We are the environment. The world is literally one biological process. The trees are our lungs. Look at the Amazon River system next to a human cardiovascular system, look at corals or trees and look at our lungs, you literally cannot tell the difference. They’re the same. So when we destroy our environment, we’re effectively destroying ourselves.
Ian Somerhalder
Persistence is the most traveled path to success.
Bryant McGill
Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
LeRoi Jones
When we hold-on to someone's imperfections we become emotionally pair-bonded to their maladies.
Bryant McGill
The dark war consciousness and pride have seized upon the weak, with great cynicisms and glib, soulless intellects, that grind away like robotic gears at what they despise and can never understand.
Bryant McGill
(backpacker having conversation with Lizzie the Australian main character)Backpacker: 'What's the drinking age in Australia?''eighteen''is that enforced'Lizzie thought for a second before answering seriously, 'yes, they make us drink
Catherine Deveny
In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals.
Mahatma Gandhi
Right before Jesus went to the cross, He prayed that all believers, past, present, and future "may be one, as You, Father are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me" (John 17:21 NKJV). This was Jesus's prayer for us all, yet more often than not, I fear we have not lived up to it. Instead, we fight for our own way, for our selfish desires, for our right to be superior. We build churches centered on our own cultural ideas of God, rather than on seeking to bring us back to Him. And then we fight with other churches and religions about who is serving their personal culture god the best. Come dream with me. Dream of a fight for something bigger, something more important and worthwhile. We need to fight for justice and peace, for the walls between us to come crashing down.
John M. Perkins
Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death.
Russell Brand
Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.
Maya Angelou
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")
Audre Lorde
Elisha,' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember - please remember - I was saved. I was there.
James Baldwin
[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
Rebecca Solnit
Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.
Coretta Scott King
Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren't likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and there's no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers.
Rebecca Solnit
Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.
Audre Lorde
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Alice Walker
Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.
Helen Keller
Respect is the lifeblood of progress, and the safe harbor of humanity's great aspirations.
Bryant McGill
Pain is like a healing emotional fever.
Bryant McGill
As ever, the original inhabitants of Turtle Island are entirely overlooked. Mysteriously, the only time indigenous people are guaranteed a mainstream Amerikkan mention is on Thanksgiving. Again, to contextualize, this would be be kinda like someone busting into your house and robbing you blind, then sending you postcards once a year to remind you how much they are enjoying all of your stuff, and getting annoyed with you if you don't respond with appreciation for their thoughtfulness.
Inga Muscio
The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and -- to add insult to injury -- at a profit.
The Invisible Committee
Often it isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the little pebble in your shoe.
Muhammad Ali
ALCOHOL HAS NO BIOLOGICAL CONNECTION TO ABUSE OR VIOLENCEAlcohol does not directly make people belligerent, aggressive, or violent. There is evidence that certain chemicals can cause violent behavior — anabolic steroids, for example, or crack cocaine — but alcohol is not among them. In the human body, alcohol is actually a depressant, a substance that rarely causes aggression. Marijuana similarly has no biological action connected to abusiveness.
Lundy Bancroft
The 'peace' the gospel brings is never the absence of conflict, but an ineffable divine reassurance within the heart of conflict; a peace that surpasses understanding.
Walter Wink
Loneliness is a poison, but aloneness is a catalyst.
Sam Killermann
A divorce party--that's really better than a wedding party!
Nujood Ali
We begin to understand that to co-parent is to one day look up and notice that you are on a roller coaster with another human being. You are in the same car, strapped down side by side and you can never, ever get off. There will never be another moment in your lives when your hearts don't rise and fall together, when your stomach doesn't churn in tandem, when you stop seeing huge hills emerge in the distance and simultaneously grab the sides of the car and hold on tight. No one except for the one strapped down beside you will ever understand the particular thrills and terrors of your ride.
Glennon Doyle Melton
When you are speaking to someone else you are really speaking only to yourself.
Bryant McGill
As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.
Nelson Mandela
Beyond miracles, what has lasting significance is love. It wasn’t that Jesus healed a leper, but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.
Shane Claiborne
There is no such thing as a non-subjective world to a subjective mind.
Bryant McGill
Taking advice is fine; by all means, be open-minded, but not to the point of allowing others to obliterate your uniqueness.
Bryant McGill
If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.
Naomi Wolf
The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.
Cory Doctorow