Quotes by Activists - Page 40

The Judeo-Christian heritage has left us with the view of a universe composed of warring opposites, which are valued as either good or evil. They cannot coexist. A valuable insight of Witchcraft, shared by many earth-based religions, is that polarities are in balance, not at war.
Starhawk
The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.
Mahatma Gandhi
Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.
Alice Walker
Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quaran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience of their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Pain is as expansive as life itself. Pain grows with us and in us as a cultivation of life's unfolding.
Bryant McGill
No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other.
James Baldwin
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
Betty Friedan
It happens to everyone and it happens fast.
Joseph Hansen
Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women's work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.
Audre Lorde
It's an imperfect world, so you fit in perfectly.
Bryant McGill
The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria...
Elie Wiesel
Ask the poor. They'll tell you who the christians are.
Mahatma Gandhi
Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism.In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled "Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs", and explains that it started "only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests.
Gloria Steinem
Segmentation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.
Coretta Scott King
Pope John Paul II once said as well, “Lebanon is a message more than it is a country.” Now this diversity has turned into fragmentation and the richness into poverty, awaiting a miraculous remedy.
Rami Ollaik
America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.
Tom Morello
If you're happy in a dream, does that count?
Arundhati Roy
The morning after the 9/11 attacks...we began talking about the Twin Towers attack. Ruud shook his head sadly about it all. He said, "It's so weird, isn't it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?" I couldn't help myself...I blurted out, "But it *is* about Islam. This is based in belief. This is Islam." Ruud said, "Ayaan, of course these people may have been Muslims, but they are a lunatic fringe. We have extremist Christians, too, who interpret the bible literally. Most Muslims do not believe these things. To say so is to disparage a faith which is the second largest religion in the world, and which is civilized, and peaceful." I walked into the office thinking, "I have to wake these people up."...The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion hadn't been present in Holland for centuries. It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.
Gloria Steinem
Connections are made slowly sometimes they grow underground.
Marge Piercy
Racist legacy laws and modern racist practices are all part of the same system, and it needs to be changed now.
DaShanne Stokes
Our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line – to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities – is one of human cognition's most astonishing traits. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close.
Eli Pariser
I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love?
Susie Bright
Nationalism is a form of cultural self-centeredness, and as a collective thought-form, can only exist because the dominant in-group is itself comprised of self-centered and narcissistic individuals.
Bryant McGill
You will never know anyone more intimately than yourself. Love yourself and be good to yourself.
Bryant McGill
As the aperture of your heart opens to love you will receive more of the light of compassion, acceptance, gentleness, grace and understanding.
Bryant McGill
I believe that you cannot go any further than you can think. I certainly believe if you don't desire a thing you will never get it.
Charleszetta Waddles
Only in stillness does the imperceivable become discernible
Bryant McGill
You take people as far as they will go not as far as you would like them to go.
Jeannette Rankin
I would add entertainment media cheerleader Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s Pentagon sycophant in Kuwait City, a representative of the neon press, neon being that colorless, inert gas that lights up on command.
Stan Goff
The old saying that, "you are what you eat" extends beyond the body, and includes experiences.
Bryant McGill
Politics is theater. It doesn't matter if you win. You make a statement. You say, "I'm here, pay attention to me
Harvey Milk
Believe when you are most unhappy that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain life is not in vain.
Helen Keller
Don’t be a witness. Be an activist.
DaShanne Stokes
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
Elie Wiesel
...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
Audre Lorde
I wish we'd be able to deliver our message at the global level on the need to recognize the past genocides in order to prevent new ones. Our message of peace and justice will hopefully reach every corner of the world.
Widad Akreyi
Connecting with yourself and knowing yourself is a monumental and life changing event.
Bryant McGill
Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.
Derrick Jensen
Saying it's hard being straight is like complaining to the poor that it's difficult being wealthy.
DaShanne Stokes
Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.
Rebecca Solnit
When I walk in, they may like me or dislike me, but everybody knows I'm here
Maya Angelou
The very first part in healing is shattering the silence,
Erin Merryn
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
Helen Keller
You will find your purpose revealed in every single action, once you realize that — you — are your purpose.
Bryant McGill
The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But...the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?
Martin Luther King Jr.
...the act of remembering is imagined as a real act, that is, as a physical act: as walking...the means of retrieving the stored information was walking through the rooms like a visitor in a museum...to walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.
Rebecca Solnit
We are all a part of a culture of violence that dominates every aspect of our lives.
Bryant McGill
A mn ages hs enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: I hate him not because he's my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.
Elie Wiesel
Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified.
Mahatma Gandhi
Although the world is full of suffering it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
A Woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing.She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself and only herself
Maya Angelou
I can go on the road - and I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued int he presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.
Gloria Steinem
On top of dealing with the emotional trauma associated with conscious and unconscious recalling, you must deal with the possibility of no one believing you or making you doubt your experiences. When women speak out about their abusers, they have to deal with the police and society not believing them
Malebo Sephodi
The necessity, then, of those “lesser breeds without the law”—those wogs, barbarians, niggers—is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply “spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again,” leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest.
James Baldwin
Every journey begins with the first step of articulating the intention, and then becoming the intention.
Bryant McGill
We cannot protect ourselves from disappointment and still live a fully engaged life.
Sharon Weil
My Existence is To Praise God and Help Others!
Marie Claudine MUKAMABANO
I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it must always happen "here" before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves.
James Baldwin
It was not lack of ability that limited my people, but lack of opportunity.
Nelson Mandela