Quotes by Activists - Page 50

There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It's like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: it's raining today and it's going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century.
Elie Wiesel
Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature.
Helen Keller
I didn't cross the line, you drew it in after I traversed it.
Russell Brand
Love foods that sustain and protect you, and love you back.
Bryant McGill
Control thought-forms are the basis of our deepest moral crisis.
Bryant McGill
But people are not butterflies, right.People are, well, more important than butterflies.We have opposable thumbs, hello.You can't possibly compare the sanctity of a human's life with that of a butterfly. In our culture you can and, indeed, must quantify sanctity, and butterflies have less than people.
Inga Muscio
HIV is free, why pay for it
Oche Otorkpa
For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
Elie Wiesel
Humility is not weak, powerless, faint, a pushover, a punching bag or an abuse magnet, because above all — humility cares.
Bryant McGill
How is it possible to live? Life is so hard?’‘You must be harder than life, Firdaus. Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.’‘But you are not hard, Sharifa, so how do you manage to live?’‘I am hard, terribly hard, Firdaus.’‘No, you are gentle and soft.’‘My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite deadly.’‘Like a snake?’‘Yes, exactly like a snake. Life is a snake. They are the same, Firdaus. If the snake realises you are not a snake, it will bite you. And if life knows you have no sting, it will devour you.
Nawal El-Saadawi
If you were really humble you would be great, because humility would never squander the magnificent gift of life.
Bryant McGill
Let us now yearn for the possibility of building a happiness in every heart. Let us now build inward a new world of hope, a world of limitless possibilities for the children of tomorrow, where each soul can reach the heights of their potential to love and to be loved.
Bryant McGill
We are all made complete by our pain.
Bryant McGill
Taking power away from a man is a dangerous thing. Someone always pays.
Glenn Close
I'm not ok - you're not ok and that's ok.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin
There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history or nothing happens.
Coretta Scott King
I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive
Barbara Deming
If you love someone, you will want to understand them and accept them as they grow and change; similarly, loving yourself involves a never-ending process of self-understanding and self-acceptance through life's ups and downs...we are finally coming to understand that love for neighbor and love for self naturally lead to love for the earth...if you love your neighbor as yourself, you want both them and you to be able to breathe, so you need to love clean fresh air...you want them and you to be able to drink, so you need to love pure water in all its forms...you want them and you to be be able to eat, so you need to care about the climate...." (p. 59-60)
Brian D. McLaren
The most powerful manifesting is realized by those who walk in love and create through love.
Bryant McGill
It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.
Arundhati Roy
Your success and happiness lie in you. Resolve to keep happy and your joy and you shall form an invisible host against difficulties.
Helen Keller
Little people doing little things in little places everywhere can change the world.
Anwar Fazal
Power is a thing of perception. They don't need to be able to kill you. They just need you to think they are able to kill you
Julian Assange
To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
Mahatma Gandhi
The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.
Dan Savage
You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.
Mahatma Gandhi
Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.
Mary Tyler Moore
In judging our progress as individual we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education. These are, of course, important in measuring one's success in material matters and it is perfectly understandable if many people exert themselves mainly to achieve all these. But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others - qualites which are within reach of every soul - are the foundation of one's spiritual life.
Nelson Mandela
Don’t let anyone tell you what you can and can’t do or achieve. Do what you want to do and be who you want to be. Just encourage and include each other, don’t ostracize the gender in front of you.
Emma Watson
I think there is a choice possible to us at any moment as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
Muriel Rukeyser
Your suffering needs to be respected.
Bryant McGill
So stretch! Reach for it. Like falling down stairs, where your inner-genius takes over and saves you — your instincts are ready to serve you.
Bryant McGill
...I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...
Rebecca Solnit
My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like "intersectionality" and "equality", "oppression", and "discrimination". They didn't discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.
Janet Mock
But Dracula, the book, the myth, goes beyond metaphor in its intuitive rendering of an oncoming century filled with sexual horror: the throat as a female genital; sex and death as synonyms; killing as a sex act; slow dying as sensuality; men watching the slow dying, and the watching is sexual; mutilation of the female body as male heroism and adventure; callous, ruthless, predatory lust as the one-note meaning of sexual desire; intercourse itself needing blood, someone's, somewhere, to count as a sex act in a world excited by sado-masochism, bored by the dull thud-thud of the literal fuck. The new virginity is emerging, a twentieth century nightmare: no matter how much we have fucked, now matter with how many, now matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freedom) or passion or promiscuous abandon, no matter how often or where or when or how, we are virgins, innocents, knowing nothing, untouched, unless blood has been spilled – ours: not the blood of the first time; the blood of every time; this elegant blood-letting of sex a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty, and despair. Trivial and decadent; proud; foolish; liars; we are free.
Andrea Dworkin
Do not let your grand ambitions stand in the way of small but meaningful accomplishments.
Bryant McGill
Never be content to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon. Your rights could be next.
DaShanne Stokes
Yes, indeed. San Francisco was the perfect place for a walker between worlds like Jamie Hastings to grow up in. Her soul had chosen wisely before coming in, born to a visionary mother like Amanda, and situated in one of sunny California's most beautiful landscapes.
Patricia Cori
The best way to be thankful for the gift of life is to not throw it away.
Bryant McGill
Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.
Julian Assange
This is what is behind the special relationship between tale and travel, and, perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking. To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain that the author as guide - a guide one may not always agree with our trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere. I have have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into distances so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling.
Rebecca Solnit
On Critique – Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t do or teach, criticize.
Marsha Hinds
Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.
Arundhati Roy
The bigger the mistake the bigger the opportunity.
Bryant McGill
Have you children, Mr Brandstetter?" He shook his head. "I was one once. Does it help?
Joseph Hansen
The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.
Andrea Gibson
In being everything for everyone, when am I anything for myself?
Malebo Sephodi
Trigger warnings are the most ridiculous, patronizing and infantilizing creations ever to come out of feminism....But feminists adore trigger warnings because it reinforces the idea that women are ruled by their emotions, are incapable of recovering from trauma and are just generally hysterical nitwits unprepared to confront adulthood and reality.
Janet Bloomfield
Boys don't make passes at female smart asses.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.
Brian D. McLaren
A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we've been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be left in the hands of a deregulated market system. And absolutely there are people that are at the far other end of the spectrum that want to communalize all property and abolish private property, but in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it's between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we've made a social contract to say, 'That's not a good place to have the profit motive govern.' Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. So even something like firefighting—it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn't something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don't want a market for fire.
Naomi Klein
Despite the mountain of gold that has been built downtown, Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight that made the early 1990s its worth crisis period since the early Depression.
Mike Davis
Life is nothing short of a phenomenon. In every sense life is mysterious and unfathomable.
Bryant McGill
We need to begin to see hyper-masculinity as the disorder it is, and not as a strength.
Bryant McGill
Now I had won the gold medal. But it didn't mean anything, because I didn't have the right color skin.
Muhammad Ali
This is central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as "normal".
Angela Y. Davis
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
Mahatma Gandhi
The sooner growing older is stripped of reflexive dread, the better equipped we are to benefit from the countless ways in which it can enrich us.
Ashton Applewhite
Look deeply at yourself, and see in yourself the divine architect's incomprehensible art!
Bryant McGill
The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultures made different forms of female sexual experience seem normal and desirable. The capacity for orgasm in women, she found, is a learned response, which a given culture can help or can fail to help its women to develop. Mead believed that a woman's sexual fulfillment, and the positive meaning of her sexuality in her own mind, depend upon three factors:1: She must live in a culture that recognizes female desire as being of value;2: Her culture must allow her to understand her sexual anatomy;3: And her culture must teach the various sexual skills that give women orgasms.
Naomi Wolf