Quotes by Activists - Page 44

Pastor Russell lived in nearby Pittsburgh and said that there was no hell. This was terrible for we all knew that everyone but the Baptists were going there, so to believe there was no hell upset all the countryside theology.
Ammon Hennacy
And we have the same colour eyes. When I look into his, I feel I'm looking into myself.
Alan Cumming
Being alone is much better than being around negative people out of loneliness or desperation.
Bryant McGill
As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so sex with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
Helen Keller
She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.
Andrea Dworkin
So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.
Tim Wise
What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?
Audre Lorde
Peace is a conscious choice.
John Denver
Few, if any, survive their teens.
Maya Angelou
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content
Helen Keller
Violence can be a gift. Violence belongs to everyone.
Bryant McGill
The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.
Betty Friedan
Do not make the mistake of thinking that you have to agree with people and their beliefs to defend them from injustice.
Bryant McGill
At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
Maya Angelou
Freedom means equality. If you don't believe in equality for all, you don't believe in freedom.
DaShanne Stokes
...it is not really the difference the oppressor fears so much as the similarity. He fears he will discover in himself the same aches, the same longings as those of the people he has shit on... . He fears he will have to change his life once he has seen himself in the bodies of the people he has called different.
Cherrie Morago
Are you so dead inside you don't feel the daily anguish, terror and deathly suffering of millions? What happened to you? You've changed.
Bryant McGill
I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
Audre Lorde
We find ourselves constantly in battle in the vast human theaters of conflict.
Bryant McGill
You will not be the same after the storms of life; you will be stronger, wiser and more alive than ever before!
Bryant McGill
All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.
Alice Walker
Get this through your head — you are not responsible for other people's happiness.
Bryant McGill
I no longer look to my abusers with any expectation– of remorse, or apology or restitution or restoration or relationship. I’m at peace, accepting that they won’t and can’t help me out of the mess they created. But, I’m the best qualified for that job anyway and I’m happy with the job I’m doing.
Christina Enevoldsen
Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” I knew right then what I had to do. I went straight home, got down on my knees and prayed...
Shelley Lubben
Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway.
Myles Horton
I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine", so we suppress it-until it overflows.
Gloria Steinem
Oppression theology and supremacist spirituality developed in the belief ecosystem of an angry God who needed appeasement in order to dispense grace, who favored some and disfavored others, and who welcomed the favored into religious institutions that accumulated and hoarded privilege and protected the status quo.
Brian D. McLaren
Love gives without expectation, while hate carries an endless tally of debts.
Bryant McGill
Don't be afraid that things are changing, because indeed they always are.
Sharon Weil
I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.
Audre Lorde
We must each achieve greater individual consciousness and self-knowledge, and project mindful kindness toward everything and everyone.
Bryant McGill
A president who has incited violence inspires citizens towards hate and violence.
DaShanne Stokes
Yes, we need to pray for Orlando/Britain/this election/the World, but we also need to act upon it and band together to oppose Evil.
Rowan Blanchard
When you are born into bondage you can't see the prison.
Bryant McGill
I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.
Rebecca Solnit
I believe in using words not fists.
Susan Sarandon
In the marathon of life negativity is never as light-footed as a dreamer's sprint.
Bryant McGill
An all-loving god would surely not damn his children to an eternity of torture simply for being born into a culture that believes in the wrong deity, follows the wrong holy book or attends the wrong type of church services.
Armin Navabi
In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm?
Hyeonseo Lee
Monotony is the law of nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. The monotony of necessary occupations is exhilarating and life-giving.
Mahatma Gandhi
When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Cory Doctorow
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King Jr.
If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.
Harvey Milk
Imagination belongs to hope. It’s the creative dance of possibility.
Sharon Weil
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
James Baldwin
An important step in escaping mediocrity is to stop worrying about what other people think of you.
Bryant McGill
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!
Audre Lorde
A good place to begin, is to forgive yourself for judging in the first place.
Bryant McGill
I could not feel, smell, see, hear, or taste the world around me. If I had allowed myself to experience these things in all their intensity, I might have lost my mind. If I had allowed myself to cry, I might never have been able to stop. So I survived, but I never felt joy, never felt safe.
Yeonmi Park
If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems... How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?...Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true--anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other--beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.
James Baldwin
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
Alice Walker
Choosing beauty and love does not mean being uninformed or weak; it means you clearly see the ugliness, but choose love anyway.
Bryant McGill
The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
Naomi Wolf
The political writer, then is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives.
Cherríe L. Moraga
The vile are trampled beneath the feet of other pigs.
Bryant McGill
Out of the huts of history's shameI riseUp from a past that's rooted in painI riseI'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fearI riseInto a daybreak that's wondrously clearI riseBringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,I am the dream and the hope of the slave.I riseI riseI rise.
Maya Angelou
I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.
Alice Walker
But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.
Barbara Ehrenreich
In their quest to hit cloud Nine, our young men and women intheir prime are gradually finding themselves on ground Zero,emotionally battered, academically bankrupt and medicallyparalyzed.
Oche Otorkpa
I want to understand about change--I don't just want to be at the mercy of it. I feel like I'm waking up inside. I want to know about history. I have all this new information about people like me down through the ages, but I don't know anything about the ages.
Leslie Feinberg