Quotes by Activists - Page 43

When you focus on want, you become an endless cycle of wants. To get, simply release, and then gently invite.
Bryant McGill
On the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, I salute every individual who honors the core values of his legacy, making him proud of humanity.
Widad Akreyi
To make matters worse, everyone she talks to has a different opinion about the nature of his problem and what she should do about it. Her clergyperson may tell her, “Love heals all difficulties. Give him your heart fully, and he will find the spirit of God.” Her therapist speaks a different language, saying, “He triggers strong reactions in you because he reminds you of your father, and you set things off in him because of his relationship with his mother. You each need to work on not pushing each other’s buttons.” A recovering alcoholic friend tells her, “He’s a rage addict. He controls you because he is terrified of his own fears. You need to get him into a twelve-step program.” Her brother may say to her, “He’s a good guy. I know he loses his temper with you sometimes—he does have a short fuse—but you’re no prize yourself with that mouth of yours. You two need to work it out, for the good of the children.” And then, to crown her increasing confusion, she may hear from her mother, or her child’s schoolteacher, or her best friend: “He’s mean and crazy, and he’ll never change. All he wants is to hurt you. Leave him now before he does something even worse.” All of these people are trying to help, and they are all talking about the same abuser. But he looks different from each angle of view.
Lundy Bancroft
Forgiveness is about your peace of mind. When you don't forgive, you are the one who suffers.
Bryant McGill
Your suffering is here to help you unfold and to awaken into compassion, love and strength.
Bryant McGill
Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.
Naomi Wolf
Almost everything you think is sacred, good and decent, is a lie and an all-out assault against truth and decency.
Bryant McGill
The police cannot be considered simply the custodians of the legal order, but must be seen as the guardians of the social order as well. That they defend it wearing blue uniforms rather than white sheets is a matter of only minor importance.
Kristian Williams
I'll never know why it was important to him that the couple (he said it later that he'd never seen them before) would take a picture of the whole Mr. Johnson back to Little Rock.He must have been tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame. The high topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them.I understood and felt closer to him at that moment than ever before or since.
Maya Angelou
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
Margaret Sanger
When all the public eye sees are headscarves instead of individual stories, our community is collectively tokenized. It creates the perception that opportunity is limited and only a rare few of us can make it. Whenever that happens to an already marginalized community, it pits its own members in a competition against one another instead of against the restrictive frameworks that put us in that position in the first place. The first hijabi whatever won't eliminate Islamophobia just as the first black president hasn't eliminated racism, though both are signifiers of some type of progress — symbols of ascending beyond adversity.
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh
If you look at today through the eyes of the past, you can never see what the present moment has to offer.
Bryant McGill
The stigmatization and the excruciating pains of social alienationhave compelled most victims to conceal their status while themalevolent ones continue to distribute the virus free of charge tounsuspecting men and women
Oche Otorkpa
In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.)
Gloria Steinem
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre Lorde
Straight women love a feminine sensibility in a man, but that love only goes up to, and unfortunately does not quite pass, the fact of his being an actual woman.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.
Alice Walker
You are not your mistakes and your mistakes are not you.
Bryant McGill
Suppression of love or hatred creates conflict.
Bryant McGill
Opportunity will only meet you in the domain of your chosen attitude.
Bryant McGill
Do not quarrel or restlessly seek for more knowledge, until you have given proper honor to what you already know.
Bryant McGill
Your dream is only possible through a clear intention and patience.
Bryant McGill
It is through our pain that we emerge.
Bryant McGill
Progress is not about hating or destroying America, it is about loving and building the world, which can only come from healing our national dementia.
Bryant McGill
Advertising expresses a power relationship . . . One person, the advertiser, invades; millions absorb. And to what end? So that people will buy something! A deep, profound and disturbing act by the few against the many for a trivial purpose.
Jerry Mander
13)tHave you had your own, personal earthquake? Here is what it feels like. Your insides feel like they are stretched, ready to explode. And from outside, there is a crushing pressure that is holding you down, pinning you with a force that you’ve never known. You cannot breathe. You cannot move. You cannot understand any of the words that are being said to you. A water curtain falls in front of your face, as tears drench your eyes blurring everything in sight.
Kirthi Jayakumar
Archaeology digs the Bible’s grave.
Steve Dustcircle
If you can be kind to people, you will be a genius in this world.
Bryant McGill
I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields.
Rebecca Solnit
What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are.
DaShanne Stokes
Healthy ChoicesHold stillKeep quiet.Get a degree to learn how to talksaying nothing.Catch a good manby being demure.the one your mother chooses.Let him climb youwhenever his urge,amidst headachesand menstrual achesand screaming infants.And when he bidsquick, turn over.Hold still.Make your tonguea slab of cementa white stone etchedwith your name.Kill your stories with knivesand knitting needlesand Clorox bleach.Hide in your mysteriousnessby saying nothing.Starch your thoughtswith ironed shirts.Tie your angerwith a knot inyour throatand when he comeswithout concernswallow it.Hold still.Keep desirehopeless as iceand sleepless nightsand painful as pinched eyelid.Keep your fingersfrom the razor,keep your longingto severhis condescensionsafely in your douchbag.Turn the bladeagainst yourself.Don't twitchas your slashed wristsstain your bathroom tiles.Disinfect with Pine Sol.Hold still. Keep quiet.Keep tight your lips,keep dead your dreams,keep cold your heart.Keep quiet.And he will shoutpraisesto yourperfection.
Janice Mirikitani
The master creators are masters of love.
Bryant McGill
Crisis is Good. Crisis is a Messenger.
Bryant McGill
Anyhow, with their extraordinary gift for, and experience in, affairs of the heart from the double point of view, both of the man and of the woman it is not difficult to see that these people have a special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other.
Edward Carpenter
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Who you are is why you choose poorly, or fail to choose wisely.
Bryant McGill
Success, just like poverty is a state of mind. You can become successful instantly with a simple decision and commitment. Long lasting and pronounced success comes to those who renew their commitment to a mindset of abundance every minute, hour and day.
Bryant McGill
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored: He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.
Julia Ward Howe
The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.
Naomi Wolf
It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman — and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze — as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter — one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process — sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock — demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution.
Gloria Steinem
The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Rebecca Solnit
Thank you adversity. Oh, how we stretch and grow in the shadows of darkness just to reach the light.
Bryant McGill
The only reason pain exists is because we let it feed on us and that gives it the power to continue existing (I.R.V)
Reshma Valliappan
All great achievements require time.
Maya Angelou
There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.
William Sloane Coffin Jr.
No person, no matter how important society deems their relationship to you, has the right to denounce you for who you are.
Tyler Oakley
An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John KennethGalbraith offers an economic explanation for “the persistence of the view of homemaking as a ‘higher calling’”: the concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminine Mystique, he feels, “has been forced on us by popular sociology, by magazines, and by fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our industrial society…. Behavior that is essential for economic reasons is transformed into a social virtue.
Naomi Wolf
One of the common themes you will read in interview after interview is the call to keep fighting for your vision. This is a message to women directors, producers, writers—anyone who wants to work in the business. Your voice counts. Your vision matters.
Melissa Silverstein
Whenever something good happens write it down. Buy a special notebook . . . and use it to list all the good in your life.
Peter McWilliams
In a stress pressure-cooker like America, I believe we will see more and more shooting massacres. Violence is in our cultural DNA.
Bryant McGill
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
If I were a dictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it. The state would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody's personal concern!
Mahatma Gandhi
Hiding my pain and acting strong, afraid to cry and show my tears, I struggle with all this years later.
Erin Merryn
.Ensuring that young people get the right information that will enable them make the right choices is a responsibility all citizens must take seriously
Oche Otorkpa
Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy
Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things... But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.
Helen Keller
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You hear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.
Audre Lorde
I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it’s hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine. To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write.
Leslie Feinberg