Quotes by Activists - Page 39

It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.
Gloria Steinem
What if evangelical mega churches became known around the world for things like providing water access for entire countries or fighting to end the AIDS pandemic? Imagine what integrity that would give to the good news we preach, especially the gospel that Jesus declares is good news to the poor.
Shane Claiborne
In November, when our nation remembers her fallen soldiers and honours the lost youth of my generation, the Prime Minister, government leaders and the hollow men of business affix paper poppies to their lapels and afford the dead of war two minutes' silence. Afterwards, they speak golden platitudes about the struggle and the heroism of that time. Yet the words they speak are meaningless because they have surrendered the values my generation built after the horrors of the Second World War.
Harry Leslie Smith
Uncommon success is found on the spiritual plane; you can't get there through common convention or following others. Hard work is not enough; many work slavishly-hard for little reward. Intelligence is insufficient; how many educated and brilliant people there are who fail utterly and completely. Goodness is not enough; how many meek and good souls are tilled into the earth like manure by demigods to fertilize their golden crops. There is something more — it is the unseen essential, and everyone has access to it.
Bryant McGill
Peace IS Prosperity.
Bryant McGill
Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.
Barbara Ehrenreich
We are the third world not because the sun rises on the West and sets in the East but because we have engaged the reverse gear and we are moving with jet like speed in the wrong direction -we must change this by rolling up our sleeves and working for the growth of our country.
Patrick L.O. Lumumba
We are never taught more deeply and more truthfully than by pain.
Bryant McGill
People are living books. The real library of life is community.
Bryant McGill
In today's world simple kindness is a revolutionary act.
Bryant McGill
Our values were under attacks, in ParisTell them:We stand UNITEDWe'll defend our valuesWe'll NOT be DIVIDED
Widad Akreyi
The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
James Baldwin
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house
Audre Lorde
There is no battle or engagement with any institution, company or government; it is always an engagement of ideas.
Bryant McGill
Sexiness wears thin after awhile and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that is a treat.
Joanne Woodward
Your future begins with your next thought.
Bryant McGill
Peace is the friend we find in silence.
Bryant McGill
I'm worried about my friend not being imagined complexly enough.
Esther Earl
Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.
Naomi Wolf
Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.
Gloria Steinem
Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
Andrew Boyd
Have you ever considered another type of loneliness; a good and healthy, happy loneliness?
Bryant McGill
First best is falling in love. Second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love.
Maya Angelou
As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.
Rebecca Solnit
To love your weakness, negativity and darkness is to accept half of who you are.
Bryant McGill
...I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
All truthful music is familiar to the ear, for its notes were written into our souls long ago.
Bryant McGill
You can choose better relationships, better jobs, better places to live, better uses of your time and better ways of treating yourself.
Bryant McGill
Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.
Cory Doctorow
Abuse counselors say of the abusive client: “When he looks at himself in the morning and sees his dirty face, he sets about washing the mirror.
Lundy Bancroft
And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.
Shane Claiborne
How do I negotiate my way across life with a system that I find so violent yet it seems so normal to many others?
Malebo Sephodi
We eat junk because it's cheap and it lights up the pleasure centers of our brain. And we do drugs because it's an effective way to feel good or escape something.
Linda Tirado
It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.
Cory Doctorow
Be a peacemaker who values peace and takes peace everywhere you go.
Bryant McGill
I think sexy is a grown-up word to describes a person who's confident that she is already exactly who she was made to be. A sexy woman knows herself and she likes the way she looks, thinks & feels. She doesn't try to change to match anybody else. She's a good friend herself kind and patient. and she knows how to use her words to tell people she trusts about what's going on inside of her-her fears and anger, love, dreams the mistakes, and needs. When she's angry she expresses her anger in healthy ways. When she's joyful, she does the same thing. She doesn't hide her true self because she is not ashamed. She knows she's just human-exactly how God made her and that's good enough. She's brave enough to be honest and kind enough to except others when they're honest. When two people are sexy enough to be brave and kind with each other, that's love. Sexy is more about how you feel and how you look. Real sexy is letting your true self come out of hiding and find love in safe places. That kind of sexy is good, really good, because we all we want and need love more than anything else
Glennon Doyle Melton
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
James Baldwin
We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.
Naomi Wolf
Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
Rebecca Solnit
Expand!You are not small. Your Foremothers did not do what they did so you could occupy small!
Malebo Sephodi
Even when the strings are broken in our lives, the sweet music plays on in our hearts.
Bryant McGill
We are now at risk of having a zombie democracy roaming around a one-party state.
Jeremy Corbyn
There is a law of opposition apparent in all life which guarantees balance and fullness.
Bryant McGill
When every hope is gone, 'when helpers fail and comforts flee,' I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.
Mahatma Gandhi
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
James Baldwin
So many of our problems begin when we start worrying what others think of us.
Bryant McGill
The Infinite struck the void with the sound of the Word.
Marek Halter
The outrageous madonna/whore duality that we mock in Women’s Studies 101 has its subtle, and very insidious, expression in the good/bad mother paradigm that we grapple with every day of our lives.
Shannon Drury
I am naïve and I have fucked up but I tell you something else. I believe in change. I don't mind getting my hands dirty because my hands are dirty already. I don't mind giving my life to this because I'm only alive because of the compassion and love of others.
Russell Brand
There is no enemy that respect and love will not conquer. The moral authority for survival comes from respect.
Bryant McGill
Your persistent problems are because of your response to common misfortune.
Bryant McGill
Trust others and you will be more trusted.
Bryant McGill
But it ain't easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without him is a strain
Alice Walker
Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. They all have the same vulnerability to rape, to battery, as children to incest. Poorer women have more vulnerability to prostitution, which is basically a form of sexual exploitation that is intolerable in an egalitarian society, which is the society we are fighting for.
Andrea Dworkin
Self-governance does not mean no one is responsible. It means everyone is.
Heather Marsh
Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
Rebecca Solnit
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Maya Angelou
S/M flies in the face of every attempt the state makes to appropriate our bodies, our labor, our time, and our imaginations.…the state is deeply offended by any group of people who say, 'My body doesn't belong to you, it belongs to me, so fuck off'…
Patrick Califia-Rice
It would seem probable that the attachment of such a one is of a tender and profound character; indeed, it is possible that in this class of men we have the love sentiment in one of its most perfect forms—a form in which from the necessities of the situation the sensuous element, though present, is exquisitely subordinated to the spiritual.
Edward Carpenter
Arms control is by definition a rejection of disarmament.
David T. Dellinger