Quotes by Activists - Page 57

Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River.
Gloria Steinem
I think repressing what happened is what saved me in my childhood. I was able to use my imagination to create happy events, but a little girl can carry only so much on her own.
Erin Merryn
The intimate space of your personal life should be reserved for amazing, beautiful, radiant souls — good, wholesome and loving people.
Bryant McGill
Lifting as they climb onward and upward they go struggling and striving and hoping that the buds and blossoms of their desires may burst into glorious fruition ere long.
Mary Church Terrell
The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.
Alice Walker
Lies sound like facts to those who've been conditioned to mis-recognize the truth.
DaShanne Stokes
Attachment to the external always suffocates inner peace.
Bryant McGill
I don't want revenge on the Taliban, I want education for sons and daughters of the Taliban.
Malala Yousafzai
One of the greatest challenge facing young people today, is thelarge scale availability of half truth’s and manipulated facts
Oche Otorkpa
There are worse words than cuss words there are words that hurt.
Tillie Olsen
It is astounding what power being kind, mannered, polite and considerate has in transforming your life.
Bryant McGill
Have you ever heard a woman claim that the reason why she is chronically mistreating her male partner is because a previous man abused her? I have never run into this excuse in the fifteen years I have worked in the field of abuse. Certainly I have encountered cases where women had trouble trusting another man after leaving an abuser, but there is a critical distinction to be made: Her past experiences may explain how she feels, but they are not an excuse for how she behaves. And the same is true for a man.
Lundy Bancroft
You can not change the past but you can change the future.
Immortal Technique
Have compassion for people as long as you are one of them too.
Bryant McGill
Prison is designed to break one's spirit and destroy one's resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality--all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.
Nelson Mandela
No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
Muriel Rukeyser
Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping 'unacceptable' behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.
Michael Bronski
You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.
Julian Assange
What is the American fetish about highways?They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.But what is after them?They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress.
Ishmael Reed
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does the truth become error because nobody will see it. 1924-1926)
Mahatma Gandhi
You cannot save people from themselves. All you can do is stand firmly in your hopes for them, with compassion.
Bryant McGill
Discrimination on the basis of age is as unacceptable as discrimination on the basis of any other aspect of ourselves that we cannot change.
Ashton Applewhite
To be able to shit on people before they get a chance to shit on you. That's power.
Sister Souljah
Be aware of negativity but do not let it take root in the sinews of your creative spirit.
Bryant McGill
American liberals today are hesitant to speak out against the denial of rights that is perpetrated in the name of Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
A doctor once told me I feel too much. I said, so does god. that’s why you can see the grand canyon from the moon.
Andrea Gibson
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
Audre Lorde
I write not for the sake of glory. Not for the sake of fame. Not of the sake of success. But for the sake of my soul.
Rachel Scott
Abuse and respect are diametric opposites: You do not respect someone whom you abuse, and you do not abuse someone whom you respect.
Lundy Bancroft
True creation requires authority and authenticity.
Bryant McGill
No Child of YoursI saw a child hide in the cornerSo I went and asked her nameShe was so naive and so petiteWith such a tiny frame. 'No one,' she replied, that's what I am calledI have no family, no one at allI eat, I sleep, I get depressedThere is no life, I have nothing left.''Why hide in the corner?' I had to ask twiceBecause I've been hurt, it not very niceI tried to stop it, it was out of my controlI feared for myself I wanted to go. I begged for my sorrow to disappearI turned in my bed, oh God, I knew they were near'So come on little girl, where do you goA path ahead, or a path to unknown?'With that she arose, her head hung lowShe held herself for only she knowsHer tears held back, her heart like iceIt looks as though she has paid the price.The ice started melting, her tears to flowThe memories flood back, still so many years to goThe pain, the anger all built up insideNowhere to run, nowhere to hide.It will get better, just wait and seeYou'll get a life, though you'll never be fireOpen your heart and love yourselfThe abuse you suffered was NOT your fault.
Teresa Cooper
No, It's not fair. But I was thinking more along the lines of the Pentagon and Washington itself. Sometimes I suspect that those who are running things might grow addicted to power. Secrecy's essential in wartime, but once in place, will it ever be removed?
Marge Piercy
The self is...a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on.
Rebecca Solnit
Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking, loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning.
Elie Wiesel
From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.
Arundhati Roy
And that makes us (black women) feel like we have spokespeople, because everybody we encounter feels they have a piece of you and can tell you how to live your life
Malebo Sephodi
Scriptures may have grains of historical truth within them, but there is also ample hyperbole, speculation and mythology.
Armin Navabi
I AM THE MASTER OF MY FATE AND THE CAPTAIN OF MY DESTINY.
Nelson Mandela
It always seems impossible until it's done.
Nelson Mandela
Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.
DaShanne Stokes
Every journey towards change begins with awareness.
Sharon Weil
He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
Simone Weil
The vast and beautiful world is the home we share together.
Bryant McGill
[A]s people are beginning to see that the sexes form in a certain sense a continuous group, so they are beginning to see that Love and Friendship which have been so often set apart from each other as things distinct are in reality closely related and shade imperceptibly into each other. Women are beginning to demand that Marriage shall mean Friendship as well as Passion; that a comrade-like Equality shall be included in the word Love; and it is recognised that from the one extreme of a 'Platonic' friendship (generally between persons of the same sex) up to the other extreme of passionate love (generally between persons of opposite sex) no hard and fast line can at any point be drawn effectively separating the different kinds of attachment. We know, in fact, of Friendships so romantic in sentiment that they verge into love; we know of Loves so intellectual and spiritual that they hardly dwell in the sphere of Passion.
Edward Carpenter
Poverty without a people's government looks like hopelessness, but to see poverty in organized communities is to see relief-in-progress.
Holly Near
Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.
James Baldwin
The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.
Betty Friedan
Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.
Rebecca Solnit
Makhluk kecil kembalilah. Dari tiada ke tiada. Berbahagialah dalam ketiadaanmu.
Soe Hok Gie
No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.
Gloria Steinem
The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.
Naomi Klein
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
Maya Angelou
Prostitution, perversion, and pornography are intertwined with independence and radical politics in the history of outstanding women. Radclyffe Hall, Colette, Anaïs Nin, Kate Millett, Erica Jong--all of these women used the money they made from writing about sexuality to make it possible for them to live as rebels, dykes, feminists, artists, or whatever deviant and defiant identities they assumed.
Patrick Califia-Rice
I'm trying to strip myself down to my barest essentials so I can figure out where I begin and where the woman the world told me to be begins. I'm going back to the starting line.
Glennon Doyle Melton
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship tense and anxious groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began only I was without compass or sounding line and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul and rhe light of love shone on me in that very hour.
Helen Keller
The truth is now as it was yesterday, and as it always will be, that the world is-as we are
Bryant McGill
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
Mahatma Gandhi
Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.
Cory Doctorow
Finally, the dirty little secret about sexual objectification is that it is an act that cannot be performed with any attention to its ethical meaning. Experientially —from the point of view of a man who is sexually objectifying—sexual objectification and ethical self awareness are mutually exclusive. A man cannot reflect on what he is doing and its real consequences for real people and at the same time fully accomplish the act of sexual objectifying. There's no way it can be done, because hos own subjective reality is too contingent upon the unreality of someone else. All that can be left "out there" in his field of awareness is the other person's sexedness—an abstract representation of a gender—in comparison with which his own sexedness may flourish and engorge. So it is that a man shuts off his capacity for ethical empathy—whatever capacity he may ever had—in order to commit an act of despersonalization that is "gratifying" essentially because it functions to fulfill his sense of an identity that is authentically male.
John Stoltenberg
Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.
Maya Angelou