Quotes by Activists - Page 67

You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
Rebecca Solnit
If I preached unity, I must act like a unifier, even at the risk of perhaps alienating some of my own colleagues.
Nelson Mandela
I realized that in refusing to take a vow man was drawn into temptation, and that to be bound by a vow was like a passage from libertinism to a real monogamous marriage. 'I believe in effort, I do not want to bind myself with vows' is the mentality of weakness and betrays a subtle desire for the thing to be avoided. Or where can be the difficulty in making a final decision? I vow to flee from the serpent which I know will bite me, I do not simply make an effort to flee from him. I know that mere effort may mean certain death. Mere effort means ignorance of the certain fact that the serpent is bound to kill me. The fact, therefore, that I could rest content with an effort only means that I have not yet clearly realized the necessity of definite action. 'But supposing my views are changed in the future, how can I bind myself by a vow?' Such a doubt often deters us. But that doubt also betrays a lack of clear perception that a particular thing must be renounced. That is why Nishkulanand has sung: 'Renunciaton without aversion is not lasting.' Where therefore the desire is gone, a vow of renunciation is the natural and inevitable fruit.
M.K Gandhi
Ladies, stress shows on your face. Happiness is the true beauty weapon." ( Kym Douglas / Cindy Pearlman, 2006)
Susan Sarandon
In your tragedies you will find your most magnificent opportunities for rebirth.
Bryant McGill
Life is always speaking to us at every moment.
Bryant McGill
I threw my 20th birthday party at Brown, and I didn’t even have to say to anyone not to put pictures on Facebook. Not a single picture went up. That was when I knew I’d found a solid group of friends, and I felt like I belonged.
Emma Watson
Though no longer living in silence, I continued to carry pain and memories.
Erin Merryn
Sometimes in history the name of God has been invoked on behalf of actions and movements that have ennobled the human soul and lifted the body politic to a higher plane. Take the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American civil rights movement, or Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the struggle against South African apartheid, as examples. Other times religious fervor has been employed for the worst kinds of sectarian and violent purposes. The Ku Klux Klan, the troubles in Northern Ireland, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and David Koresh's Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, are frightening examples.Is there a reliable guide to when we are really hearing the voice of God, or just a self-interested or even quite ungodly voice in the language of heaven? I think there is. Who speaks for God? When the voice of God is invoked on behalf of those who have no voice, it is time to listen. But when the name of God is used to benefit the interests of those who are speaking, it is time to be very careful.
Jim Wallis
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
Rebecca Solnit
Every shortcut has a price usually greater than the reward.
Bryant McGill
There is no one way to recover and heal from any trauma. Each survivor chooses their own path or stumbles across it.
Laurie Matthew
If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.
Gloria Steinem
Isolation is at the heart of all disease, therefore healing requires community and the support of others.
Sharon Weil
When single you are,” Roger said, imitating Yoda dispensing advice to Luke, “get laid you can. When married you get, make love you do.
Sean Kennedy
I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water your eyes won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterwards with lemon-juice they won't stink.I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I'd taken--a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination: to be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew enough secrets, I'd be like them.
Cory Doctorow
Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.
Simone Weil
Any thing or behavior too complex to understand becomes a phenomenon that could be termed spiritual or magical.
Bryant McGill
We're saying the story doesn't end here, that the air in your lungs is there for a reason.
Jamie Tworkowski
and everybody was happy that uncle lee was able to get that scholarship even though you wondered when you could do quadratic equations in your head why you had a basketball scholarship but you always knew that you had to take what they were giving since that was all you were going to get but you never fooled yourself about either the taking or the giving or the needing or the having you just sort of said to yourself I'll have to see what is being offered
Nikki Giovanni
We each project to others a reflection of the world which includes our choices of perception.
Bryant McGill
When at 15, my girlfriends started dropping out of their beloved sports teams, because they didn’t want to appear muscle-y, when at 18, my male friends were unable to express their feelings, I decided that I was a feminist.
Emma Watson
Fear is always death. Faith is life. Have faith and your victory is assured.
Bryant McGill
Progress and healing involves seeing every person as not so different from ourselves.
Bryant McGill
If I’m going to have hope, I’m going to have to learn to endure disappointment.
Sharon Weil
Only by speaking out can we create lasting change. And that change begins with coming out.
DaShanne Stokes
...I was a Champion living the Champion life where nothing was impossible and everything was an opportunity. With my ugly past behind me, I boldly stepped onto my new street and breathed in the fresh cool air.
Shelley Lubben
Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.
Naomi Wolf
When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.
Rebecca Solnit
Privilege is when your voice is the norm but still you claim to be unheard.
DaShanne Stokes
We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become
James Baldwin
The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves agains the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger's usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.
Audre Lorde
I am not here to entertain straight people.
Sarah Schulman
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Soujourner Truth
It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I come to know trees fear man.
Alice Walker
Stop listening to the TV tell you about America the beautiful . . . get up and be America the beautiful.
Rivera Sun
Iranian women are very consciously aware of gender-explicit oppression. Therefore: with so much more at stake, Iranian women have each other's back: on the street, in stores, at celebrations, everywhere.
Inga Muscio
Real problems can't be fixed with a motivational poster, a cute quote or a pat on the back.
Bryant McGill
You can never know where you are going unless you know where you have been.
Amelia Boynton
If you can't show it, you don't know it.
Aron Ra
Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.
James Baldwin
She said, 'No, you learned that you have power - power and determination. I love you and I am proud of you. With those two things, you can go anywhere and everywhere.
Maya Angelou
When you reach out to those you need to forgive, it is you that will be touched and healed.
Bryant McGill
Leaving ‘things’ up to chance is the lazy man’s mantra. The successful man takes action every day, until his purpose is fulfilled.”—Daliah Husu—
Daliah Husu
I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?
Maya Angelou
She closed her eyes briefly, feeling sick. Olivia had experienced strangulation before. Having to look directly into the face of the person who was killing you made the experience beyond awful. But there were worse things than that. Staring into the void of unresolved memory, living an eternal mystery, waking up night after night seeing the face of someone you desperately wanted to save but having not the slightest clue how to do it—all that was worse. If going through with this experience gave her the answers she needed, if it gave her peace, it would be well worth one-hundred-and-thirty seconds of fear and pain.
Leslie Parrish
Theology alone doesn't convine anyone.Only those words which are pregnant with action, theology that is born of suffering, of struggles, of the poor--this theology is a testimony. This theology leads to conversion. (Leonardo Boff, p. 169)
Mev Puleo
Worry is the opposite of power.
Bryant McGill
It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American
Naomi Wolf
I know that I haven't powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.
Tillie Olsen
She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims...
Arundhati Roy
It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn't feel, or if he wins.
Audre Lorde
Change occurs on a continuum and does not move in a straight line.
Sharon Weil
My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.
Mahatma Gandhi
Globally, millions of married men and women engage the servicesof sex workers each year. Despite growing health concerns aboutthe increased risk of STDs and HIV AIDS this trade continues toblossom, leading to the premature termination of several lives andthe dissolution of several marriages.
Oche Otorkpa
From this Legionary school a new man will have to emerge, a man with heroic qualities; a giant of our history to do battle and win over all the enemies of our Fatherland, his battle and victory having to extend even beyond the material world into the realm of invisible enemies, the powers of evil. Everything that our mind can imagine as more beautiful spiritually; everything the proudest that our race can produce, greater, more just, more powerful, wiser, purer, more diligent and more heroic, this is what the Legionary school must give us! A man in whom all the possibilities of human grandeur that are implanted by God in the blood of our people be developed to the maximum. This hero, the product of Legionary education, will also know how to elaborate programs; will also know how to solve the Jewish problem; will also know how to organize the state well; will also know how to convince other Romanians; and if not, he will know how to win, for that is why he is a hero. This hero, this Legionary of bravery, labour, and justice, with the powers God implanted in his soul, will lead our Fatherland on the road of its glory.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
All of the great mastermind thinkers throughout history have known that we become our thoughts.
Bryant McGill
The resistance, though it comes in many forms, begins with the mistaken belief that I am somehow separate from change, and that I can control it, rather than to align myself with change as it makes itself apparent, and ride it.
Sharon Weil
[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
Angela Y. Davis
I was brought up by people who loved others. I love people. We had no animosity. We had no feeling that we hate anyone.
Amelia Boynton Robinson