Quotes by Activists - Page 61

The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, and unacknowledged problem we don't discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act.
Laura Bates
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE... AND BEG EVERYONE... TO HELP RESCUE ALL IMPRISONED WOMEN.
Widad Akreyi
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest it seems is an interest in life good bad or peculiar.
Grace Paley
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.
James Baldwin
Activists have not been passive. For decades, we have tried every tactic to shift the course of our governments. We have voted, written editorials and manifestos, donated money, held signs, protests in marches, blocked streets, shared links, signed petitions, held workshops, knitted scarves, learn to farm, turned off the television, programmed apps, engaged in direct action, committed vandalism, launched legal challenges against pipelines . . . and occupied the financial districts. All this has been for naught. A new approach to activism and a new kind of protest are desperately needed.
Micah White
I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.
Nawal El-Saadawi
Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.
Rebecca Solnit
There are turning points in everyone's life when we have to fight, even if we have to do it by ourselves and in public.
Junius Williams
If your positivity immune system is low, any exposure to a person afflicted with negativity can poison your life.
Bryant McGill
Through spiritual maturity you will see new ways to avoid unnecessary suffering; wiser ways to endure unavoidable hardships with grace, and opportunities to turn your pain into lessons of service and healing for others.
Bryant McGill
Life is gassy you just have to blow through it to see clearly and if eventually you see through, don't be misleaded by what you see either good or bad.
Mark Abraham
All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.
James Baldwin
He loves me so he hurts meTo try and make me good.It doesn't work. I'm just too badAnd don't do what I should.My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are so many compartments with so many triggers. I'll remember a smell which reminds me of a man which reminds me of a place which reminds me of another man who I think was with a woman who had a certain smell — and I'm back to square one. This is the case for most survivors, I believe. When we try to put together our pasts, the triggers are many and varied, the memories are disjointed — and why wouldn't they be? We were children. Even someone with an idyllic childhood who is only trying to remember the lovely things which happened to them will scratch their head and wonder who gave them that doll and was it for Christmas or their third birthday? Did they have a party when they were four or five? When did they go on a plane for the first time? You see, even happy memories are hard to piece together — so imagine how hard it is to collate all of the trauma, to pull together all of the things I've been trying to push away for so many years.
Laurie Matthew
The power of love is that it sees all people.
DaShanne Stokes
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 way.It is not OK to miss a part of your life because of pain and excessive bleeding.It is not OK to be bed-ridden for two-to-three days a month.It is not OK to pain during sex.It is not OK to have major bloating or na
Susan Sarandon
If no one had ever challenged religious authority, there’d be no democracy, no public schools, women’s rights, improvements to science and medicine, evolution of slavery and no laws against child abuse or spousal abuse. I was afraid to challenge my religious beliefs because that was the basis of creation—mine anyway. I was afraid to question the Bible or anything in it, and when I did, that’s when I became involved with PFLAG and realized that my son was a perfectly normal human being and there was nothing for God to heal because Bobby was perfect just the way he was.
Mary Griffith
I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)
Gloria Steinem
Extreme nationalism objectifies and dehumanizes those from other countries.
Bryant McGill
There’s a larger point to be made here than my own obtuseness, which is the fragility, beauty, and at the same time resilience of any communication. An inchoate impulse forms into a feeling that resembles but can never match the dreamy intensity of the original impulse. This feeling then articulates itself, but the words at best approximate a shadow of the feeling. I speak or write these words, and of course the person who receives them brings to that receiving his or her own connotations: Cinnamon, for example, may conjure different memories and may mean something different for you than for me. These words may then settle into feelings, leading finally, perhaps, to some impulse on your part. With so many layers of interpretation, it's no wonder we so often misunderstand each other. And this is between two people who speak the same language. How much more difficult understanding can be, then, when the people do not share a common cultural background, or native tongue? How much more than this may we misunderstand when we then hear a dog speak, or a tree or stone?
Derrick Jensen
No matter their party, people with a conflict of interest should be banned from the Electoral College.
DaShanne Stokes
The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn't exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds - what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me - you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have "gilded lives"! You're making a fuss about nothing. You're overreacting. You're uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, light up...You really need to learn to take a compliment.
Laura Bates
Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.
Betty Friedan
Always bet on the underdog. They've got ambition and nothing to lose.
Clint Borgen
The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders … I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one’s right to privacy.
Harry Leslie Smith
Only inner-mastery can bring outer-mastery.
Bryant McGill
I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss
Maya Angelou
Something about Tilo’s new home reminded Musa of the story of Mumtaz Afzal Malik, the young taxi driver whom Amrik Singh had killed, whose body had been recovered from a field and delivered to his family with earth in his clenched fists and mustard flowers growing through his fingers. That story had always stayed with Musa – perhaps because of the way hope and grief were woven together in it, so tightly, so inextricably.
Arundhati Roy
I have always found that actively lovingsaves one from a morbid preoccupationwith the shortcomings of society.
Alan Paton
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.
James Baldwin
The important thing is not that we can live on hope alone but that life is not worth living without it.
Harvey Milk
The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.
Julian Assange
You are what you consume, and as an organism and consciousness, you in fact become a commodity and predator yourself.
Bryant McGill
The Media and the internet have taken up the responsibility of molding the young ones amongst us, leaving us to pursuethe careers we treasure.
Oche Otorkpa
Cecil reached for Dave, but Dave stepped back. "Dave, why are you doing this? You're not getting paid. Lovejoy called you off the case. You want the truth? You're compulsive. You can't leave it alone. You're like Adam Streeter, you know that? You live for danger." "I live for justice," Dave said."Justice is a dream," Cecil scoffed, "a romantic ideal. Who the fuck gets justice in this life?(...)
Joseph Hansen
All talk of women's rights is moonshine. Women have every right. They have only to exercise them.
Victoria Claffin Woodhull
Our grief is not a cry for war."That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.
Gloria Steinem
There is force in the universe, which, if we permit it, will flow through us and produce miraculous results.
Mahatma Gandhi
Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.
Naomi Wolf
Herein is a capital truth. It is not the natural capacity, the congenital gift, nor is it the effort, the will, the work, which in the intelligence as sway over the energy capable of making it fully efficacious. It is uniquely the desire, that is, the desire for beauty. This desire, given a certain degree of intensity and purity, is the same thing as genius. At all levels it is the same thing as attention. If this were understood, the whole conception of teaching would be quite other than it is. First, one would realize that the intelligence functions only in joy. Intelligence is perhaps even the only one of our faculties to which joy is indispensible. The absence of joy asphyxiates it.
Simone Weil
She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Daddy maybe loved me more than he loves her. This isn't true, and she knows that now--people love different people in different ways--but it must have seemed that way to her when we were little. I look as though I just can't make it, she looks like can't nothing stop her. If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don't see what they see, this can be very painful. I think that's why Sis was always in front of that damn mirror all the time, when we were kids. She was saying, 'I don't care. I got me.' Of course, this only made her come on stronger than ever, which was the last effect she desired: but that's the way we are and that's how we can sometimes get so fucked up. Anyway, she's past all that. She knows who she is, or, at least, she knows who she damn well isn't.
James Baldwin
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.
Mahatma Gandhi
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
Ishmael Reed
You are never more alive than when you are enraptured by pain.
Bryant McGill
In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
While most activists could use a good dose of gentleness, I think most believers could use a good dose of holy anger.
Shane Claiborne
I know that through the grace of God I am the founder of Manitoba.
Louis Riel
A robust regional food system that benefits eaters and farmers cannot be achieved in a marketplace that is controlled, top to bottom, by a few firms and that rewards only scale, not innovation, quality, or sustainability.
Wenonah Hauter
Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
Marian Wright Edelman
Real love sometimes means saying goodbye.
Bryant McGill
Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.
Helen Keller
I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.
James Baldwin
To live a wonderful life create more, buy less, hug more, scold less, give more, take less, forgive more, worry less and be grateful everyday for life.
Bryant McGill
If you defend free speech for bigots but not to combat bigotry, then you believe in bigotry, not free speech.
DaShanne Stokes
Love should never mean having to live in fear.
DaShanne Stokes
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
James Baldwin
There is nothing you will ever do that is more important than being honest about who you really are.
Bryant McGill
Chasing the external to achieve joy is a death-trap for personal-development.
Bryant McGill
Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
Arundhati Roy
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy
At home I am a nice guy but I don't want the world to know. Humble people I've found don't go very far.
Muhammad Ali