Quotes by Activists - Page 4

I suppose the half-breeds in Manitoba in 1870 did not fight for two hundred forty acres of land but it is to be understood there were two societies who treated together. One was small but in its smallness it had its rights. The other was great but in its greatness it had no greater rights than the rights of the small because the right is the same for everyone.
Louis Riel
The Futures Bright, Wear Your Sunglasses
Ian Somerhalder
Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.
Naomi Wolf
A person at peace can immediately recognize a consciousness in crisis, whereas those in crisis cannot fully understand themselves or others.
Bryant McGill
If sex is not just about reproduction, it is not just about genes, XY chromosomes, and hormones either. Sex is introduced to explain skeletal structure, mental aptitude, posture, emotional disposition, aesthetic preference, body fat, sexual orientation and responsiveness, athletic ability, social dominance, shape and weight, artistic ability. It is also supposed to explain any number of so-called "instincts", including the nesting instinct, the maternal instinct, and perhaps even the Budweiser instinct.
Riki Anne Wilchins
All your troubles, struggles, pains and suffering is worth one good thing.
Bryant McGill
When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
I've realized that everything is about relationships. I've witnessed that ultimately you can't take what you don't give because there is a master bookkeeper out there who keeps accounts balanced. This fundamental link between man, plants, and the earth has been documented since the dawn of civilization.
Vivian Elisabeth Glyck
But the most catastrophic display of misogyny in all religion lies at the very heart of Christianity—in the story of the Virgin Mary. That Jesus was born of a virgin is a fundamental narrative upon which all Christianity is based. It is one that is carried through to Islam, where the Quran holds Mary in great esteem.The implications of this have historically been devastating to women....Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ as a virgin, with no man ever having touched her. She is therefore described as pure, chaste, undefiled, innocent—being the product of an “immaculate conception” herself (as per Catholic doctrine), and now hosting God’s immaculate son in her unblemished womb.What does this mean for women who are touched by men? Are their conceptions corrupted? Are their characters and bodies now impure or unchaste? Have they been “defiled”?...Was all of Mary’s beauty, sanctity, chastity, and innocence confined to her vagina?Fetishizing Mary’s virginity—as Christians and Muslims both do—is a sickness that directly leads to a dangerous, unnatural glamorization of celibacy and sexual repression.”Excerpt From: Ali A. Rizvi. “The Atheist Muslim.” iBooks.
Ali A. Rizvi
I am aware I sound like a Marxist Victor Meldrew but, guess what, I'm over 50 and I don't give a fuck.
Mark Thomas
Immediate gratification is a dream killer.
Bryant McGill
Monster a person though monster not human.Monster like music. Like Beatles! Like Schumann!World full of stupid. World full of noise.Monster feel ANGRY. No birthday. No joys.World full of JUNK monster not comprehend.What is a childhood? What is a friend?Monster and human both want the same.Want conversation. Want love. WANT NO PAIN.If monster speak heart: monster life only worsen.Monster not human: BUT MONSTER A PERSON!
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
Simone Weil
If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.
Rebecca Solnit
It turned out to be a war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pillai, would end almost before it began. Victory was gifted to him wrapped and beribboned, on a silver tray. Only then, when it was too late, and Paradise Pickles slumped softly to the floor without so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance, did Comrade Pillai realize that what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory. War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.
Arundhati Roy
She knew that her lifework had changed forever that day. She was being called to use her gift to help prevent a tragedy such as this from ever happening again. And she knew, without question, that the whales and dolphins would reach out to her again, from the other side of the night . . . and she would be there.
Patricia Cori
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez
As Christians, we should be the best collaborators in the world. We should be quick to find unlikely allies and subversive friends, like Jesus did.
Shane Claiborne
Courage is knowing that you're beaten and forging ahead anyway.
Zach Wahls
When the whole world is silent,Even one voice becomes powerful.
Malala Yousafzai
A mistake made by many people with great convictions is that they will let nothing stand in the way of their views, not even kindness.
Bryant McGill
I thank God for my handicaps for through them I have found myself my work and my God.
Helen Keller
As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.
Gloria Steinem
All relaxation does is allow the truth to be felt. The mind is cleared, like a dirty window wiped clean, and the magnitude of what we might ordinarily take for granted inspires tears.
Jay Michaelson
Have you ever felt love?Did you need scientific proof of this? How would you have definitively and scientifically proved your love existed? If you could not prove it, would that mean your love didn't exist? What would you trust: your own feelings, or science?
Derrick Jensen
Your suffering needs to be respected. Don't try to ignore the hurt, because it is real. Just let the hurt soften you instead of hardening you. Let the hurt open you instead of closing you. Let the hurt send you looking for those who will accept you instead of hiding from those who reject you.
Bryant McGill
If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.
Maya Angelou
Pain is a horribly wonderful gift.
Bryant McGill
The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
Barbara Ehrenreich
When you release the illusion of control, you begin an effortless free-fall toward a grand reunion with your original self.
Bryant McGill
Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't.
DaShanne Stokes
Dreams are the sources of action the meeting and the end a resting place among the flight of things.
Muriel Rukeyser
Positive thoughts (joy happiness fulfillment achievement worthiness) have positive results (enthusiasm calm well-being ease energy love). - Negative thoughts (judgment unworthiness mistrust resentment fear) produce negative results (tension anxiety alienation anger fatigue).
Peter McWilliams
We all make mistakes, but one of our biggest mistakes is continually revisiting the past.
Bryant McGill
There will be a great imbalance in our strengths if we fight, because I am prepared to die and you are desperate to live.
Tehmina Durrani
A society that has destroyed freedom and beauty must itself be destroyed.
Bryant McGill
At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
Barbara Ehrenreich
We cannot afford to be discouraged from challenging the corporate control of our food system, our genetic commons, our shared resources, or our democracy. The history of social change in our nation shows that the political system can be reformed, even if the road is long and zigzag.
Wenonah Hauter
My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.
Grace Paley
Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
Elie Wiesel
Negativity is a natural part of your perfect self.
Bryant McGill
It's not 'over-sensitivity' to ask to be treated with the same dignity and respect shown to others.
DaShanne Stokes
What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial...[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick.
Betty Friedan
Selfishness is blind.
Mahatma Gandhi
It's actually such a tragedy that I live in a world that is inspired by me putting my body or mental state on the line
Malebo Sephodi
The original Hebrew word for woman, a word that is used twice to refer to the first woman, three times to refer to strong military forces, and sixteen times to refer to God, is this: Ezer...I learn this: "The word Ezer has two roots: strong and benevolent. The best translation of Ezer is: Warrior." God created woman as a Warrior.
Glennon Doyle Melton
All success comes through other people.
Bryant McGill
At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter. At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more, pushing us to further enhance our image with the best designer labels and latest spiritual fads, weighing us down with layer upon layer of heavy, uncomfortable, pretentious, well-starched religiosity.
Brian D. McLaren
Possibilities for women have become so open-ended that they threaten to destabilize the institutions on which a male-dominated culture has depended, and a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes has forced a demand for counter images.The Beauty Myth
Naomi Wolf
If you are unhappy with your life and the state of the world, the best place to start changing things is within yourself.
Bryant McGill
Start thinking of your guilt as being selfish, because guilt blocks opportunities from arriving for those you care about and for you.
Bryant McGill
Increasingly, the girl child is becoming an endangered specie aspedophiles’ continue to roam free in our societies terrorizingthe lives of our children and stripping them of all the joy andexcitement that comes with childhood.
Oche Otorkpa
The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
James Baldwin
Through TV people turn their family living rooms into meditative dens of death and violence worship.
Bryant McGill
Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition.
Pyotr Kropotkin
The act of true giving is indistinguishable from receiving.
Bryant McGill
One passionate heart can brighten the world. From person to person the chain reaction burns through us — setting heart to heart ablaze, and lighting the way for us all!
Bryant McGill
Being considerate of others will take you and your children further in life than any college or professional degree.
Marian Wright Edelman
Opportunity will always meet you exactly where you stand.
Bryant McGill
The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?
Maya Angelou