Quotes by Activists - Page 51

A slut isn’t a person, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she’s done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it’s a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and ‘conquests’ like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less.
Laura Bates
You set the standard for how people will treat and regard you, by how you treat and regard yourself.
Bryant McGill
Ignorance is a terrible thing. It causes families to lose their center and causes people to lose their control. Ignorance knows no binds. Old people, young people, middle-aged, black, white, can all be ignorant.
Maya Angelou
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE...AND REMIND EVERYONE...OF THE FATE...OF THE ENSLAVED...YAZIDI WOMEN
Widad Akreyi
When people have poor confidence in the future, you can be confident of a poor future.
Bryant McGill
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya Angelou
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us it's in everyone.
Nelson Mandela
Because of my schooling, my fate would always be a little different from my friends.
Daoud Hari
No despotism, no privileged monopolies, no police societies, no divine rights of the emirs or feudal landlords or shady priests and sheikhs. All had the same equal footing—the rich and the poor, the noble and the common.
Rami Ollaik
As long as one keeps searching the answers come.
Joan Baez
I'm a writer to the bone. I love this language you and I read, write and speak. It's called English. And I'm seriously doubting that it's known to some of the unseen people who write the news.
Ann Medlock
Dare not surrender to weakness you divine creation!
Bryant McGill
Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change.
Paul Rogat Loeb
I am pleased God made my skin black. I only wish He had to made it thicker.
Curt Flood
There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.
Bryant McGill
Love is about the good moments, but it's about holding on to each other during the difficult ones, too. Coming out on the other side, weathered but still holding hands, isn't easy. It's the most difficult thing there can possibly be, but I know now it's the truest test of love there is.
Aisha Saeed
I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.
Nelson Mandela
t— This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.—tWho knows it better?—tYet you believe?tKumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. There is my wife, and you, my friend, and these people who welcomed me, and the child who is so eager to be with us here in Ndotsheni – so in my suffering I can believe.— I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.Kumalo looked at his friend with joy. You are a preacher, he said.
Alan Paton
Wise Child: Why don't you beat me then?Juniper: I can't be bothered.
Monica Furlong
God loves a prayer of action.
Bryant McGill
If you believe what you say, words become reality.
Ingrid Betancourt
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Nelson Mandela
Along with the trust issues, one of the hardest parts to deal with is the feeling of not being believed or supported, especially by your own grandparents and extended family. When I have been through so much pain and hurt and have to live with the scars every day, I get angry knowing that others think it is all made up or they brush it off because my cousin was a teenager. I was ten when I was first sexually abused by my cousin, and a majority of my relatives have taken the perpetrator's side. I have cried many times about everything and how my relatives gave no support or love to me as a kid when this all came out. Not one relative ever came up to that innocent little girl I was and said "I am sorry for what you went through" or "I am here for you." Instead they said hurtful things: "Oh he was young." "That is what kids do." "It is not like he was some older man you didn't know." Why does age make a difference? It is a sick way of thinking. Sexual abuse is sexual abuse. What is wrong with this picture? It brings tears to my eyes the way my relatives have reacted to this and cannot accept the truth. Denial is where they would rather stay.
Erin Merryn
Your burdens are perfectly measured and gifted to you according to your resistance.
Bryant McGill
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
James Baldwin
About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink – it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal) – and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.
James Baldwin
If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to inheritance left by our ancestors.
Mahatma Gandhi
Don't buy the garbage that you're over the hill at fifty. This country makes such a big thing about age particularly if you're a woman. What I think is relevant is your experience what you have to offer. I hope people will recognize that and keep going.
Molly Yard
While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness the weight of that silence will choke us.
Audre Lorde
Accept that you are not finished, and a new and better life is just beginning.
Bryant McGill
I raise up my voice-not so I can shout but so that those without a voice can be heard...we cannot succeed when half of us are held back.
Malala Yousafzai
One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.
Bryant McGill
We have been trained by a culture of violence and we are all agents of passive violence.
Bryant McGill
Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day ah now that's a real treat.
Joanne Woodward
Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.
Elie Wiesel
Adoptees deserve open records because deception and partial truths do not set us free.
DaShanne Stokes
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.
Elie Wiesel
If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it’s almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up.
Maya Angelou
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free While God is marching on.
Julia Ward Howe
Where do dreams come from?...they slink out of books, they lurk in the stacks of libraries. Out of pages turned they rise like the scent of peonies and infect the brain with their promises.
Marge Piercy
I don't believe vegans (or vegetarians) who still get their (packaged, preservative/chemical-ridden) food from industrial food systems have any righteous ground to stand on, nor do I think a deep look at the sentient life of plants or the true environmental impact of agriculture permits them any comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in this world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether running on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you've never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord.
Brian Awehali
Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.
Laura Bates
When I no longer have your heartI will not request your bodyyour presenceor even your polite conversation.I will go away to a far countryseparated from you by the sea— on which I cannot walk —and refrain even from sendinglettersdescribing my pain.
Alice Walker
But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.
Rebecca Solnit
Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.
Gloria Steinem
Every new encounter provides a new mirror for me to view my own experiences through, and there is a level of selfishness during this period as I hunger to understand more about the girls' lives in order to understand mine. If I could figure out what had happened to them, perhaps I had a better chance of explaining it all to myself.
Rachel Lloyd
I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.
William Sloane Coffin Jr.
For me writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead (2.) it produces a sense of accomplishment and once in a while pride and (3) it's frightening.
Gloria Steinem
As long as the Earth can make a spring every year I can. As long as the Earth can flower and produce nurturing fruit I can because I'm the Earth. I won't give up until the Earth gives up.
Alice Walker
Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
We must not define Jesus and his kingdom by fitting them within conventional understandings of kings and kingdoms. Rather, we must judge and deconstruct those conventional definitions in light of Jesus and his example.
Brian D. McLaren
This isn't about keeping mountains looking pretty. Ending mountaintop removal is about keeping humanity alive.
Rivera Sun
So while this is a book about fighting back, in the end this is a book about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love. They need your heart because they are disappearing, slipping into that longest night of extinction, and the resistance is nowhere in sight. We will have to build that resistance from whatever comes to hand: whispers and prayers, history and dreams, from our bravest words and braver actions. It will be hard, there will be a cost, and in too many implacable dawns it will seem impossible. But we will have to do it anyway. So gather your heart and join with every living being. With love as our First Cause, how can we fail?
Derrick Jensen
We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.
Rebecca Solnit
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
Betty Friedan
Everyone doesn’t need to have the same beliefs, we just need to start believing in everyone.
Sam Killermann
Did you play by the rules and work hard but feel empty and unfulfilled? It's because you were lied to.
Bryant McGill
What I experience of change is either the flow of the movement of change or my resistance to it.
Sharon Weil
There is a kind of counter-criticism that seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A great work of criticism can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not against interpretation, but against confinement, against the killing of the spirit. Such criticism is itself a great art.This is a kind of criticism that does not pit the critic against the text, does not seek authority. It seeks instead to travel with the work and its ideas, to invite it to blossom and invite others into a conversation that might have previously seemed impenetrable, to draw out relationships that might have been unseen and open doors that might have been locked. This is a kind of criticism that respects the essential mystery of a work of art, which is in part its beauty and its pleasure, both of which are irreducible and subjective. The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.
Rebecca Solnit
The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
Rebecca Solnit