Quotes by Activists - Page 49

Once you find your positive vision, then share the victory of your loving attitudes with everyone.
Bryant McGill
I don't know how to stop the atrocities. I don't know how to make people care. But looking into my sister's eyes, we seem to have carved out something between us that none of the madness can touch. Invisible threads.
Lisa J. Shannon
A protect-yourself-first-and-foremost idea has subverted the mission of law-enforcement officers, just as it may have degraded the military's.
Ann Medlock
Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did.
Sophie Scholl
breathe in experience breathe out poetry
Muriel Rukeyser
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
Maya Angelou
If you are not on your path of purpose, you will only have misery in your life.
Bryant McGill
We all draw breath and life from the same source of creation.
Bryant McGill
Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.
Lierre Keith
If you lay with a scorpion, don't be surprised when it finally stings you.
DaShanne Stokes
The future depends on what we do in the present.
Mahatma Gandhi
It is important to note that when Mary Magdalene and other women were chosen by Jesus to bring the important news to the men, the men did not believe the women. Today 2,000 years later men still don't believe women when they say "We are also chosen by Jesus to be leaders in the church.
Roy Bourgeois
How much could the person you love change, and still remain the same person to whom you'd made your promise? We don't expect our lovers to remain the same over the course of a long relationship. In fact, if you're married at sixty-five to the same person you married when you were twenty, your marriage has probably failed. But there are changes, over time, that spell doom for a marriage, although exactly what these are, and to what degree, varies from couple to couple. For some people, vast changes over time make no difference to the fundamental sense of devotion one soul has for another. But for others, relatively small changes can push things to the breaking point: gaining or losing weight, gaining or losing faith, gaining or losing wealth. How does any relationship survive in the end, when change is the only constant?
Jennifer Finney Boylan
However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? 'If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!' shouts the child.
Audre Lorde
You have to be smart to get what you want.
Bryant McGill
It is likely that religious beliefs have been so widespread because they tap into the psychological desires of many people, not because there is any external proof of their veracity.
Armin Navabi
The same numbness and disappointment every day sends some people looking for something tragic for proof of life.
Bryant McGill
Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. ... Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
Helen Keller
A man, whilst he is dreaming, believes in his dream; he is undeceived only when he is awakened from his slumber.
Mahatma Gandhi
Education is education. We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow." Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.
Malala Yousafzai
Forgiveness, no matter your motive, is a dynamic of mutual healing.
Bryant McGill
it will be miraculous, very miraculous.
Malika Oufkir
I understand that sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.
Yeonmi Park
Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.
Alice Walker
Economist Marvin Harris described women as a 'literate and docile' labor pool, and 'therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries.' The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.
Naomi Wolf
We shall do even greater things because the love that lived in the radical Christ now lives within millions of ordinary radicals all over the planet.
Shane Claiborne
I want to define success by redefining it. For me it isn't that solely mythical definition - glamour, allure, power of wealth, and the privilege from care. Any definition of success should be personal because it's so transitory. It's about shaping my own destiny.
Anita Roddick
In modern politics, even the leader of the free world needs help from the sultan of Facebookistan.
Rebecca MacKinnon
I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Audre Lorde
Fill the cup of happiness for others and there will be enough overflowing to fill yours to the brim.
Rose Pastor Stokes
When we can't let go of the past, painful moments accumulate in us; metastasizing in our consciousness like an emotional cancer.
Bryant McGill
My look, mind you, is not chocolate like Lauryn Hill, Whoopi Goldberg, or Naomi Campbell - it is pitch black and shimmering like the purple outer space of the universe. I am the charcoal that creates diamonds. I am the blackest black woman (41).
Kola Boof
Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one.
Shane Claiborne
The reason America is in its death-throes is because America has lost moral authority.
Bryant McGill
Naw, I say. Mr ____, can tell you, I don't like it at all. What is it to like? He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I pretend I ain't there. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep.She start to laugh. Do his business, she say. Do his business. Why, Miss Celie. You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you.That's what it feel like, I say.She stop laughing.
Alice Walker
To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
Jane Jacobs
We've got to make change our national pastime and hold protests more regularly than weekend parties.
Rivera Sun
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
Arundhati Roy
If someone would have talked in school about safe touch and unsafe touch, I believe I would have spoken up as a child and not been victimized over and over again for years, but that day never came, which is why my mission now is to protect children from the childhood I could not be protected from.
Erin Merryn
Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.
Andrea Dworkin
When you are broken open you get to discover for the first time what is inside you.
Bryant McGill
Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it.
James Baldwin
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
Maya Angelou
I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.
James Baldwin
Being love-filled and beautiful is one of the most powerful defenses that one can employ.
Bryant McGill
At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.
Rebecca Solnit
The minute we look away, the minute we stop fighting back, that's the minute bigotry wins.
DaShanne Stokes
What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem to obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like?
Naomi Wolf
Not knowing the answer to a question is not a valid excuse for making up a fairytale to explain it.
Armin Navabi
Truth is hard, propaganda is cheap.
DaShanne Stokes
God has no religion.
Mahatma Gandhi
The practical consequence of both of the teachings noted is to encourage homosexual promiscuity. Church members can engage in many short-term liaisons without raising questions about their standing in the church. We tend not to pry into one another's private lives. But if a man brings another man to church with him regularly, if they give the same address and show signs of mutual affection, then there is likely to be a scandal. The dominant effect of church teaching is to encourage secret, temporary liaisons without commitment and to discourage long-term fidelity.
Walter Wink
And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.
Shane Claiborne
The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
James Baldwin
...churches would aim to take people at every age and ability level and help them become the most loving version of themselves possible. They would help people face the challenges of life--challenges that could make them bitter, self-absorbed, callous, or hateful--with openness, courage, and generosity. (p. 54)
Brian D. McLaren
No one is charismatic. Someone becomes charismatic in history, socially. The question for me is once again the problem of humility. If the leader discovers that he is becoming charismatic not because of his or her qualities but because mainly he or she is being able to express the expectations of a great mass of people, then he or she is much more of a translator of the aspirations and dreams of the people, instead of being the creator of the dreams. In expressing the dreams, he or she is recreating these dreams. If he or she is humble, I think that the danger of power would diminish.
Myles Horton
We begin to understand that to coparent is to one day look up and notice that you are on a roller coaster with another human being. You are in the same car, strapped down side by side and you can never, ever get off. There will never be another moment in your lives when your hearts don't rise and fall together, when your minds don't race and panic together, when your stomachs don't churn in tandem, when you stop seeing huge hills emerge in the distance and simultaneously grab the side of the car and hold on tight. No one except for the one strapped down beside you will ever understand the particular thrills and terrors of your ride.
Glennon Doyle Melton
The more I can accept the fact that change is moving all the time, and that the change I am experiencing right now is just the change of this moment and that this moment will change into the next and the next, the less need I will have to clutch in fear.
Sharon Weil
Where there is love there is life.
Mahatma Gandhi