Quotes by Activists - Page 53

Love your body, love your sexuality, and realize that you are a bad human being only if you are unkind and cruel and do harm unto others and not because of your sex life.
Roxana Shirazi
Even when something is not your fault, toxic blame has no place in your life. Focus on your own empowerment and healing.
Bryant McGill
As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: "What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.
Mahatma Gandhi
Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!
Maya Angelou
If you live with values for yourself, then you become of great value to all who know you.
Bryant McGill
American culture is a sheep culture—long on talk about individualism, but even longer on absolute conformity. Most still believe that individuality is based on which model car you like best—commodity identity, a selection of personalities on a shelf full of products approved by the Federal Identity Administration. I’m a Taurus aspiring to be a Lexus.
Stan Goff
It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong but it will advance its allotted length.
Helen Keller
Life wants you to have gratitude for the gift of living. Treasure every second.
Bryant McGill
Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students-the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated-turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.
Cherríe L. Moraga
I don't know what to do, and if I did know what to do I wouldn't tell you, because if I had to tell you today then I'd have to tell you tomorrow, and when I'm gone you'd have to get somebody else to tell you.
Myles Horton
I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Without leaps of the imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning
Gloria Steinem
Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.
Bryant McGill
But as I began to write this book, I realised that without the whole truth my life would have no power, no real meaning. With the help of my mother, the memories of our lives in North Korea and China cane back to me like scenes from a forgotten nightmare. Some of the images reappeared with a terrible clarity; others were hazy, or scrambled like a deck of cards spilled on the floor. The process of writing has been the process of remembering, and of trying to make sense out of those memories.
Yeonmi Park
I who am blind can give one hint to those who see: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to the other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. make the most of every sense; glory in the beauty which the world in all the facets of pleasure reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, I am sure that sight is the most delightful.
Helen Keller
I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Martin Luther King Jr.
...my mind was consumed with the idea of purdah. From behind it no call for help could be heard. An abandoned species was trapped in a forbidden world. Everything corrupt happened under the shroud, when it was off a faceless and nameless woman appeared.
Tehmina Durrani
Paris and HelenHe called her: golden dawnShe called him: the wind whistlesHe called her: heart of the skyShe called him: message bringerHe called her: mother of pearl barley woman, rice provider, millet basket, corn maid, flax princess, all-maker, weefShe called him: fawn, roebuck, stag, courage, thunderman, all-in-green, mountain strider keeper of forests, my-love-ridesHe called her: the tree isShe called him: bird dancingHe called her: who stands, has stood, will always standShe called him: arriverHe called her: the heart and the womb are similarShe called him: arrow in my heart.
Judy Grahn
Nature tops the list of potent tranquilizers and stress reducers. The mere sound of moving water has been shown to lower blood pressure.
Patch Adams
I will follow anyone and tell everyone my message because it is urgent: Please humanity Protect Yazidis.
Widad Akreyi
This myth of meritocracy and equal opportunities encourages individualism over collective action, because when people believe this myth, they obviously see no need for protest movements around particular classes or identities, such as the Women's Movement or the Civil Rights workplace, education or in their personal lives, they are more likely to blame themselves, rather than sexism, racism, class oppression or homophobia; concepts which in current society are often seen as out of date. This type of blame even applies to experiences of actual violence or harassment with too many people believing that it is their fault if they are sexually harassed in the workplace or at school, abused by a partner or are a victim of sexual violence. Our society encourages this view, and in turn, that keeps people isolated and alone, rather than providing them the opportunity to get involved in collective struggles against such common experiences.
Finn Mackay
Love is the strongest force the world possesses and yet it is the humblest imaginable.
Mahatma Gandhi
In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.
Marge Piercy
If you haven't forgiven yourself something how can you forgive others?
Dolores Huerta
Trump didn't divide America. He just doused us with gasoline and fanned the flames.
DaShanne Stokes
Those who support such survivors of abuse often find it difficult to hear the reality of those survivors' lives and experience and are often unsupported themselves. Rather than being supported, workers are often ridiculed, castigated or accused of being gullible or of giving the survivor false memories. Many workers work in isolation and a climate of hostility and are unable to talk about the work they do.Yes, despite all the odds, survivors of ritual abuse are beginning to speak out about their experiences, and some people, mainly in voluntary organisations, are beginning to listen to them and support them.[Published 2001]
Laurie Matthew
Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and criticize others who have to fight for the things you take for granted.
DaShanne Stokes
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin
If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.
Naomi Wolf
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND TELL EVERYONEABOUT...THE REAL WAR ON WOMENON YAZIDI GIRLS & WOMEN
Widad Akreyi
The idea that private money can solve our problems is very dangerous. Ultimately that's charity. Charity is a lovely thing. I'll never turn it down. But charity is not a substitute for systematic justice and equality.
Jonathan Kozol
To gain that which is worth having,it may be necessary to lose everything else.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrow. -Isaiah 53: 4 (NASB)
Shelley Lubben
If you don't accept and respect your suffering, it isn't going anywhere.
Bryant McGill
Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn't for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out.
Gloria Steinem
I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father's ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.
Gloria Steinem
From generation to generation, America should never be the same country.
Bryant McGill
In the face of every type of pain, we tend to think that life will never be the same, but guess what, it was never going to be the same anyway.
Bryant McGill
The key ingredient to any kind of happiness or success is to never give less than your best
Russell Simmons
The dream is real my friends. The failure to realize it is the only reality.
Toni Cade Bambara
Truly I have looked into the very heart of darkness, and refused to yield to its paralyzing influence, but in spirit I am one of those who walk the morning. What if all dark, discouraging moods of the human mind come across my way as thick as the dry leaves of autumn? Other feet have traveled that road before me, and I know the desert leads to god as surely as the green, refreshing fields, and orchards.
Helen Keller
The Purpose of life is to thrive and save lives with passion! Save Yazidis today with love and compassion!
Widad Akreyi
People have moments of consciousness and epiphanies throughout their lives, but then suppress the realization.
Bryant McGill
We are currently facing countless hurdles and obstacles, BUT will never lose the sight of infinite hope.
Widad Akreyi
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
Audre Lorde
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.
Audre Lorde
The false world is full of illusions and misery.
Bryant McGill
Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they're falling likethey're falling in love with the ground.
Andrea Gibson
This is not a men vs women issue. It’s about people vs prejudice.
Laura Bates
The core of liberation theology is profoundly "theologal" - that is, rooted in the very nature of God. You see, there's an immediate relationship between God, oppression, liberation: God is in the poor who cry out. And God is the one who listens to the cry and liberates, so that the poor no longer need to cry out. ( Leonardo Boff, p. 166)
Mev Puleo
Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.
Maya Angelou
It is a high spiritual truth that we create with our judgements.
Bryant McGill
Friendship marks a life even more deeply rhan love. Love risks degenerating into obsession friendship is never anything but sharing.
Elie Wiesel
They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.
Mahatma Gandhi
When our institutions lack movement to propel them forward, the Spirit, I believe, simply moves around them, like a current flowing around a rock in a stream...without that soul work that teaches us to open our deepest selves to God and ground our souls in love, no movement will succeed and no institution will stand...it is the linking of action and contemplation, great work and deep spirituality, that keeps goodness, rightness, beauty, and aliveness flowing...as Pope Francis has said, this moment calls for social poets: sincere and creative people who will rise on the wings of faith to catch the wind of the Spirit, the wind of justice, joy, and peace. (p. 180)
Brian D. McLaren
Growth and empowerment requires reflection and facing the frightening, ugly, hard and unbearable reality.
Bryant McGill
Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare social justice can never be attained.
Helen Keller
Want is always hungry and searching whereas contentment is steady, calm and receiving.
Bryant McGill