Quotes by Activists - Page 63

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.
Angela Davis
I love my God. I thank my Allah. I talk to him all day. He is the greatest. By giving me this height to reach people, he has also given me great responsibilities. Peace in every home, every street, every village, every country – this is my dream. Education for every boy and every girl in the world. To sit down on a chair and read my books with all my friends at school is my right. To see each and every human being with a smile of happiness is my wish.
Malala Yousafzai
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Maya Angelou
To understand the journey you have to do the walking.
Bryant McGill
I try not to speak about all the charities and people I help, because I believe we can only be truly generous when we expect nothing in return.
Muhammad Ali
Nothing will change until we change - until we throw off our dependence and act for ourselves.
Myles Horton
This is the legend of Cassius Clay, The most beautiful fighter in the world today.He talks a great deal, and brags indeed-y, of a muscular punch that's incredibly speed-y.The fistic world was dull and weary,But with a champ like Liston, things had to be dreary.Then someone with color and someone with dash, Brought fight fans are runnin' with Cash.This brash young boxer is something to see And the heavyweight championship is his des-tin-y.This kid fights great; he’s got speed and endurance,But if you sign to fight him, increase your insurance.This kid's got a left; this kid's got a right,If he hit you once, you're asleep for the night.And as you lie on the floor while the ref counts ten,You’ll pray that you won’t have to fight me again.For I am the man this poem’s about,The next champ of the world, there isn’t a doubt.This I predict and I know the score,I’ll be champ of the world in ’64.When I say three, they’ll go in the third,10 months agoSo don’t bet against me, I’m a man of my word.He is the greatest! Yes!I am the man this poem’s about,I’ll be champ of the world, there isn’t a doubt.Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment,I’ll hit him so hard; he’ll wonder where October and November went.When I say two, there’s never a third,Standin against me is completely absurd.When Cassius says a mouse can outrun a horse,Don’t ask how; put your money where your mouse is!I AM THE GREATEST!
Muhammad Ali
Animal welfare - yes. Animal rights - don't make me laugh. I'm not an animals rights activist. I certainly do not love animals. In fact, I secretly mistrust all four-legged / furry / two-winged / feathered / shelled ar scaly brothers and sisters. If I were them, I would by now be plotting ultimate revenge on a scale previously unknown to man. ... I stick to a vegan diet only for reasons of self-preservertion. Call it insurance. When the time of the great animal uprising comes, I may have a small chance of escaping ...
Sharon Dodua Otoo
Real transformation requires real honesty. If you want to move forward — get real with yourself!
Bryant McGill
A fool can't help but be a fool, but when others follow, he makes a fool of us all.
DaShanne Stokes
It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.
Naomi Klein
The concurrence of two elements is necessary for bringing about a revolution; and by revolution I do not mean the street warfare, nor the bloody conflicts of two parties—both being mere incidents dependent upon many circumstances—but the sudden overthrow of institutions which are the outgrowths of centuries past, the sudden uprising of new ideas and new conceptions, and the attempt to reform all political and economical institutions in a radical way—all at the same time. Two separate currents must converge to come to that result: a widely spread economic revolt, tending to change the economical conditions of the masses, and a political revolt, tending to modify the very essence of the political organisation—an economical change, supported by an equally important change of political institutions.
Pyotr Kropotkin
You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
Rebecca Solnit
We must strive for literacy and education that teach us to never quit questioning and probing at the assumptions of the day.
Bryant McGill
Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.
Naomi Wolf
Live in the present, or die in your past; it's your choice.
Bryant McGill
Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Throughout my life, I never sought retribution against those who hurt me because I believe in forgiveness. I have practiced forgiving, just as I want to be forgiven. Only God knows what's in a person's heart, his true intentions. He sees and hears all things.
Muhammad Ali
Beauty" and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be "beautiful" to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both "beautiful" and "sexual" constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.
Naomi Wolf
With your breath, issue words of a new contract. Become the law creator of a new prosperity.
Bryant McGill
The most effective way to do it is to do it.
Toni Cade Bambara
Last summer we had eight people in the [Christian] congregation who danced four different sun dances. Of course the missionaries have said all along that those ceremonies are pagan and we can't do that. Our people insist that they are free in the gospel, free in Christ Jesus, to participate in Indian religious forms and ceremonies. - George Tinker
Jim Wallis (Author)
He was a man's man: an expert on the golf course, a force to be dealt with in business, and a Texan through and through--and proud of it.
Patricia Cori
In sum, one of the primary things I learned was how to kill time. I learned also to wish away my life. I learned to give myself away.
Derrick Jensen
The number one skill in life is not giving up.
Bryant McGill
There is a heady sense of manhood that comes from advancing from apathy to commitment, from timidity to courage, from passivity to aggressiveness. There is an intoxication that comes from standing up to the police at last.
David T. Dellinger
The beautiful world is just one thought away. It's already there just waiting for us to realize and to accept it.
Bryant McGill
Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?""Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.""And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?
James Baldwin
If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.
Nikki Giovanni
I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...
Rebecca Solnit
The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.
Gloria Steinem
Don't forget, and don't let your reader forget, that the small world in which you have held him for the last hour or two hasn't ended. Be aware, and make him aware, that tomorrow all of its remaining inhabitants will pick up the broken fragments of their lives, and carry on.
Joseph Hansen
Rationalizing him and the glass pipe, Dad smoked crack, but he was not a crackhead; it was just something he did. To do something didn't define you, I thought.I saw Dad through a dusty lens that distorted our relationship, as tarnished as his pipe. He was no longer just our father; he was his own person, with an identity and label and body separate from his relationship with us. He was someone who was judged outside of the lens of fatherhood, outside of our connection. When he was in the streets, he was not Dad. He was Charlie the crackhead.
Janet Mock
It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
Maya Angelou
Fine sermons have been preached on the text that those who have should share with those whohave not, but he who would act out this principle is speedily informed that these beautiful sentimentsare all very well in poetry, but not in practice. “To lie is to degrade and besmirch oneself,” we say, andyet all civilized life becomes one huge lie. We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to thepractice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselveswith sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man.But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth or cease to exist.
Pyotr Kropotkin
My biggest fear is that the enlightened Arab thinkers are gong to leave the Arab world in search of fresh air: somewhere far away from the sword of the religious authorities.
Raif Badawi
If you can't see past my name, you can't see me.
DaShanne Stokes
Hold faithfully to your unique vision and your detractors will eventually tire and give-up.
Bryant McGill
How odd it is that we judge a woman by her clothes and the place she eats lunch and the subjects she talks about with her colleagueson her coffee break, yet we don’t judge a man if he doesn’t grow his beard or if he works with women or speaks to them. Why do Saudi women allow subjugation to a man and adhere to men’s rules and conditions? Why did I?
Manal Al-Sharif
No political body is sacred, sustainable or under protection, which allows the exploitation of its weakest citizens.
Bryant McGill
Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.
Gloria Steinem
Though we loved school, we hadn't realized how important education was until the Taliban tried to stop us. Going to school, reading and doing our homework wasn't just a way of passing time, it was our future.
Malala Yousafzai
My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges.
Helen Keller
But to punish and not to restore, that is the greatest of all offences.
Alan Paton
Just as people asked ‘Why do they hate us?’ after 9/11, one evening I asked my father, ‘Why did they do this to us?’ He took a long breath and paused, deeply concerned about what he was about to say. ‘The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians. They want us dead because they hate us’ This hate was not because we had armies in the Middle East or because we supported Israel or for any of the reasons people easily turn to today. It was because we were Christians, infidels. As a child, I was just too young to understand all the political implications, but I understood one thing: people wanted to kill me simply because I was a Christian.
Brigitte Gabriel
Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.’ He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.
James Baldwin
After my first experience via yoga, I became incredibly focused on experiencing that sense of stillness again. The stillness that reminded me that I could be a better person, a better friend, a better citizen of the world, as well as a better businessman.
Russell Simmons
There are times when sympathy is as necessary as the air we breathe.
Rose Pastor Stokes
(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Worse
Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just "human rights," and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.
Arundhati Roy
Everybody’s scared, but if you don’t let your fears stop you, that’s bravery.
Leslie Feinberg
It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can see and so one can say, ‘There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty patch.
Andrea Dworkin
My scars teach me that I am stronger than what caused them.
Manal Al-Sharif
You can only access the beautiful world through faith by truthfully embracing beauty and caring.
Bryant McGill
There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
James Baldwin
That was when it became abundantly clear to me that simply eating in a way that avoided hurting others was never going to be enough if my eating habits were still hurting me.
Jasmin Singer
Today whenever women gather together it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building. And if you feel the strain you may be doing some good work.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
The fact is that some things will be lost in our new way of life. It is useless to pretend that the transformation to a lower-energy, lower-consumption society will always be painless and easy. Thus, the only possible way we can bring it about is to replace some of the pleasures we are losing with new ones -- with rituals of non-consumption that offer us something to replace what is lost.
Sharon Astyk
the Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.
Dan Savage
When it comes to dress, we are supposedly free to wear whatever we want - but if this is the case, why do we wear such similar clothes? Why are we choosing to wear shoes that are almost perfectly designed to make walking as difficult as possible?
Caroline Criado-Pérez