Quotes by Activists - Page 66

There is a simple path to follow, that appears only when you calm your mind.
Bryant McGill
It's the way some men say, 'I'm not the problem' or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, 'What do they want--a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?
Rebecca Solnit
In some counties, there is an actual named crime of ritual abuse and there too, there have been convictions.
Laurie Matthew
When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
Marian Wright Edelman
Your complete intelligence is designed to experience the fullness of life, not a narrow omission of its best possibilities.
Bryant McGill
Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.
Andrea Dworkin
Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
Rebecca Solnit
Children are everything we could have been.
Bryant McGill
The fearful have lost faith while the fearless allow faith to lead the way.
Bryant McGill
Whenever I hear someone who has not had a transsexual experience say that gender is just a construct or merely a performance, it always reminds me of that Stephen Colbert gag where he insists that he doesn’t see race. It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you’re not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.
Julia Serano
The central question is not: what is force and what is freedom? That is a good question, but in the realm of human cruelty - the realm of history - it is utterly abstract. The central question is: why is force never acknowledged as such when used against the racially or sexually despised? Nazi terror used against the Jews is not in dispute. Still, there is an almost universal - and intrinsically anti-Semitic - conviction that the Jews went voluntarily to the ovens. Rational discourse on how the Jews were terrorized does not displace or transform this irrational conviction. And similarly, no matter what force is used against women as a class or as individuals, the universal conviction is that women want (either seek out or assent to) whatever happens to them, however awful, dangerous, destructive, painful, or humiliating. A statement is made about the nature of the Jew, the nature of the woman. The nature of each and both is to be a victim. A metaphysical victim is never forced, only actualized.
Andrea Dworkin
Life is calling you. The other life. The analogue life. The real. Nature is calling you. And people too. Wondrous royal souls are waiting to meet, appreciate and experience you.
Bryant McGill
There is nothing 'honorable' or 'reasonable' in giving a pass to those who want to discriminate.
DaShanne Stokes
Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.
Rebecca Solnit
Denying the popular vote is un-American and anti-democratic.
DaShanne Stokes
I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others.
Rebecca Solnit
We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.
Grace Paley
The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.
Betty Friedan
What happens to those who live dangerously by being true to who they are?
Bryant McGill
[I]t takes so little effort and money to get rid of malaria, to bring in clean water, to give people a chance at an education. When you don't have hope, that's when people start to do weird, horrible, violent things. That's at the bottom of it. It's just a question of prioritizing. The funds are t
Susan Sarandon
The life you want is a manifestation of self-realization.
Bryant McGill
We must question every inner-belief we possess without fear or attachment.
Bryant McGill
When i ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, i can feel the Spirit whisper to me, ‘you tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.
Shane Claiborne
You have to notice the truth in order to be able to avoid it.
Sarah Schulman
No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
Annie Besant
It’s funny, because we all read history and we think, ‘Oh, I would … have risen up, I would have fought, I would have been an abolitionist,' And I tell them, ‘No, you wouldn’t have. If you would have, you’d be doing that right now. You know trafficking exists, you’ve heard of it, but you don’t want to look.
Tim Ballard (Operation Underground Railroad)
If you can’t beat fear, just do it scared.
Glennon Doyle Melton
Each person is a vast territory of undiscovered mystery as nebulous and uncharted as the deepest oceans and expanses of space.
Bryant McGill
Let them have guns' is as much a solution to mass murder and gun violence as 'Let them have drugs' is a solution to drug addiction.
DaShanne Stokes
To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.
Rebecca Solnit
The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.
Tim Wise
Do not be limited by the judgements of others.
Bryant McGill
Clear out all of those doubts and fears. Let the past be the past. It's time.
Bryant McGill
The offspring of nationalist thinking too often expresses itself in exclusionary and passively-violent legal policies, and then sadly, through militarism, which becomes manifest on the endless blood-soaked borders and battlefields of humanity's great failure as a humane species.
Bryant McGill
We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?
Shirley Graham Du Bois
Although the typical abusive man works to maintain a positive public image, it is true that some women have abusive partners who are nasty or intimidating to everyone. How about that man? Do his problems result from mistreatment by his parents? The answer is both yes and no; it depends on which problem we’re talking about. His hostility toward the human race may sprout from cruelty in his upbringing, but he abuses women because he has an abuse problem. The two problems are related but distinct.
Lundy Bancroft
Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.
Maya Angelou
Finding beauty in the common is the sign of a gifted mind.
Bryant McGill
I’m much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don’t work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it.
Myles Horton
My goal is to do something outrageous every day.
Maggie Kuhn
Some people know of no other way to interface with others except through their created chaos.
Bryant McGill
Well, normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big.” — Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attending his big 90th birthday bash last year)
Pete Seeger
One of the most radical and revolutionary things you can do is grow your own food and eat from the land.
Bryant McGill
I'm told by my young friends that experience is much more important than books. Of course Ben Franklin had something to say about experience and fools, but even Franklin thought that a fool would learn by his experience. That has proven false in the modern world. Some people are simply unwilling to learn under any circumstances, which maybe, even then, wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so damned proud of it.
Nikki Giovanni
Sex discrimination and hate crimes against women don't come from the leather community or its pornography. They occur within contexts like industrial capitalism and marriage that most people take for granted as if they had always existed, like gravity or continental drift. If feminism is going to change the world, it has to focus its critical lens on what most people think is normal, not on what most people think is abnormal.
Patrick Califia-Rice
I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.
Maya Angelou
Life's pressure is equal to your resistance.
Bryant McGill
Even when I knew people were cheating me, what was important was how I behaved, because I have to answer to God. I can't be responsible for other people's actions: They will have to answer to God themselves
Muhammad Ali
Balance and fullness exists in the polarity of all things.
Bryant McGill
Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it's so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator.
Laura Bates
We are all frail-embodied creatures, who at times suffer through injustice, abuse, illness, pain and misfortune.
Bryant McGill
The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did--which was to hide.
James Baldwin
And let's just be honest, there is no such place called 'justice,' if by that we envision a finish line, or a point at which the battle is won and the need to continue the struggle over with. After all, even when you succeed in obtaining a measure of justice, you're always forced to mobilize to defend that which you've won. There is no looming vacation. But there is redemption in struggle.
Tim Wise
If you don't believe in God, then the God concept is a great placeholder for everything we don't know, which is exponentially more than we do know.
Bryant McGill
The real safety net of life is community, family and nature.
Bryant McGill
I have witnessed how the power of listening, storytelling and embracing gray areas breaks through the rigid 'us vs. them.
Aspen Baker
God is merciful cant we all be on the right track of faith but just using different roads?
Ali Al-Ahmed
Some pray to marry the man they love My prayer will somewhat vary: I humbly pray to Heaven above That I love the man I marry.
Rose Pastor Stokes
Speak kindly to and of yourself.
Bryant McGill