Quotes by Activists - Page 5

Today I am 65 years old. I still look good. I appreciate and enjoy my age. A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take advantage of it. You still bring to bear all your prior experience, but you are riding on another level. It's completely liberating.
Nikki Giovanni
The real troubles with living is that living is so banal.
James Baldwin
In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.
Edward Carpenter
Beating yourself up over every perceived mistake is the work of an internal abuser who must be restrained and reformed.
Bryant McGill
White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as "tokenism". For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart – or, as they like to say, progress. Perhaps. It all depends on how one reads the word "progress". Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet.
James Baldwin
Lovers remain in each other's energy fields for 21 days after intercourse. Renewed with each act. Do the math. Choose wisely... otherwise you're carrying that stink with you for a long time...Stop having sex right now!...All of you. Until you know you're not giving yourselves away." - Sheerah
Sharon Weil
Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.
Faye Wattleton
Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.
Rebecca Solnit
In her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to become, to act, to change self and society. And each year she is stronger and there are more of her.
Andrea Dworkin
We must remember that we cannot change others, we can only change ourselves.
Bryant McGill
So everybody lives the way they're told to.The way they have to. Everybody most of the time. Not ever all the time. Hair style, clothing, manner of speech, ideas, cars, houses, and everything. Just like they have to. Even the way we walk. But not all the time. Comes a time when everybody breaks out. And that's the only characteristic of human nature I know of. Not greed, not obedience, not violence, nor any of those things the capitalists would have us believe are intrinsic. Only rebellion.
Helen Potrebenko
By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values.
Naomi Wolf
Don't allow others to make you feel small. You came to this world to grow and to explore and touch the miracles and marvels of life.
Bryant McGill
One day, in the very early months of the project, I read several entries in a single week from girls who had been subjected to leering and shouting from men in the street while walking home from school in their uniforms. Dismayed, I posted a question on Twitter: Surely, I asked, this couldn't be a common occurrence? By the end of the day, a deluge of hundreds of tweets had confirmed that the experience was not only common but almost ubiquitous.
Laura Bates
In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss. By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance.
Gloria Steinem
Panic is not an effective long-term organizing strategy.
Starhawk
Navigating change is the new stability.
Sharon Weil
Proclaim now that you refuse to die without fully living!
Bryant McGill
DB: There's a lot of talk about terrorism. In fact, it's become almost an obsession for the media in the United States. But it's a very narrow definition of terrorism.AR: Yes. It completely ignores the economic terrorism unleashed by neoliberalism, which devastates the lives of millions of people, depriving them of water, food, electricity. Denying them medicine. Denying them education. Terrorism is the logical extension of this business of the free market. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war - people who believe that it isn't only the state that can wage war, but private parties as well.If you look at the logic underlying an act of terrorism and the logic underlying a retaliatory war against terrorism, they are the same. Both terrorists and governments make ordinary people pay for the actions of their governments. Osama bin Laden is making people pay for the actions of the US state, whether it's in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, or Afghanistan. The US government is making the people of Iraq pay for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The people of Afghanistan pay for the crimes of the Taliban. The logic is the same.Osama bin Laden and George Bush are both terrorists. They are both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people's lives. Bush, with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al Qaeda.
Arundhati Roy
Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
Alice Walker
We write for the same reason that we walk , talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someone - because we have the impulse to explain who we are.
Maya Angelou
I would never have broken up with you," I said earnestly. "I'm more miserable without you than I am with you." As soon as that sentence came out I groaned, because I knew how bad it sounded.But Declan laughed. "Vintage Simon Murray comment.
Sean Kennedy
What if one out of every three multinational corporation CEO's were raped every year? Don't you think that would raise a kind of ruckus?
Inga Muscio
The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth's climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.
Starhawk
Woman must not accept she must challenge.
Margaret Sanger
We each have our own beliefs. What is important is not to piush your beliefs onto others.
Samina Ali
I realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that humanity has advanced so far in spite of them. & now I am in the fight to change things. I may be a dreamer, but dreamers are necessary to make facts!
Helen Keller
Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!
Gloria Steinem
My mouth is a fire escape.The words coming outdon’t care that they are naked.There is something burning in there.
Andrea Gibson
That night when you kissed me, I left a poem in your mouth, and you can hear some of the lines every time you breathe out.
Andrea Gibson
Nonviolence simply cannot defend property rights over human rights.
David T. Dellinger
In silence there is a perfection which any toil injures.
Bryant McGill
We must become reacquainted with our true human selves.
Bryant McGill
May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.
Nelson Mandela
The more we're thrown into conflict with each other through engineered distrust, the less able we are to unite against those responsible.
DaShanne Stokes
To the lack of incentive to effort which is the awful shadow under which we live may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.
Mary Church Terrell
The book in my hands became my trusted companion. What was written there had so much power that it forced me to stop avoiding myself, to make my own choices as well. And through some sort of vital intuition, I understood that I had a long way to go, that it would bring about a profound transformation within me, even though I could not determine it's essence, or its scope. In that book there was a voice, and behind that voice threw was an intelligence that sought to establish contact with me. It was not merely the company of written words that distiller my boredom. It was a living voice, speaking. To me.
Ingrid Betancourt
Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.
Dan Barker
Dragons and Afterlife .. I don't see any difference between both of them, we didn't see neither the dragons nor afterlife, we just heard about them and both of them are superstitions with no scientific or logical evidence .. But the only reason you believe in afterlife unlike dragons is that you've been taught to believe in it from your birthday. now if they taught you to believe in dragons and if it were mentioned in your Bible or your holy book you would have believed in it .. herein lies the danger of religions, you can believe something exists without any evidence .. and that's why you should only follow science and let go of your religious teachings
Sherif Gaber
You have put me in here a cub, but I will come out roaring like a lion, and I will make all hell howl!
Carry A. Nation
In the beginning there was faith-which is childish; trust-which is vain; and illusion-which is dangerous.We believed in God; trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark from the Shekhinah's flame; that every one of us carries in his eyes and in his soul a reflection of God's image.THAT was the source if not the cause of all our ordeals.
Elie Wiesel
You are being guided when you need it most — if you will just listen.
Bryant McGill
Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.
Arundhati Roy
The world, in spite of oppression, is a beautiful place.
Assata Shakur
You might tell me that you have been engaging in some deep questioning and theological rethinking.1 You can no longer live with the faith you inherited from your parents or constructed earlier in your life. As you sort through your dogma and doctrine, you’ve found yourself praying less, less thrilled about worship, scripture, or church attendance. You’ve been so focused on sorting and purging your theological theories that you’ve lost track of the spiritual practices that sustain an actual relationship with God. You may even wonder if such a thing is possible for someone like you.
Brian D. McLaren
We are all just humble students of the world.
Bryant McGill
Enthusiasm is the energy and force that builds literal momentum of the human soul and mind.
Bryant McGill
Wear #gratitude and life will show unto you into rhythm of synchronicity #quote
Thomas Muriuki
Religion is for those who are scared of hell, and spirituality is for those who have been there.
Bonnie Raitt
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy
Your every ill-thought, secreted hate, cynical and vicious judgment you carry is meant only for you.
Bryant McGill
I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.
Rebecca Solnit
When all you know is pain you don’t know that that is not normal. It is not a woman’s lot to suffer, even if we’ve been raised that
Susan Sarandon
There's no God higher than truth.
Mahatma Gandhi
Certainly I believe that God gave us life for happiness, not misery. Humanity, I am sure, will never be made lazy or indifferent by an excess of happiness. Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. Happiness should be a means of accomplishment, like health, not an end in itself.
Helen Keller
If you have never found yourself, the best place to look is in your loneliness, and rock-bottom is even better.
Bryant McGill
Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.
Alice Walker
I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your mother.
Maya Angelou
Stop blaming and start being!
Bryant McGill
When we hear these kinds of excuses from a drunk, we assume they are exactly that—excuses. We don’t consider an active alcoholic a reliable source of insight. So why should we let an angry and controlling man be the authority on partner abuse?
Lundy Bancroft