Quotes by Activists - Page 70

In the moments of your deepest need, despair and desperation, what you need more than any other thing, is calm and faith.
Bryant McGill
Love is a practice of self-mastery.
Bryant McGill
Only when you decide to truly live can you be free of your fears, and only when you are free of your fears can you truly live.
Bryant McGill
What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
Naomi Wolf
In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity.
Maya Angelou
I am a men's liberationist (or "masculist") when men's liberation is defined as equal opportunity and equal responsibility for both sexes. I am a feminist when feminism favors equal opportunities and responsibilities for both sexes. I oppose both movements when either says our sex is THE oppressed sex, therefore, "we deserve rights." That's not gender liberation but gender entitlement. Ultimately, I am in favor of neither a women's movement nor a men's movement but a gender transition movement.
Warren Farrell
You can't pay attention to your mistakes. I made a mistake today I made a mistake yesterday. I think it's ... very important to ignore the negative.
Jerry Rubin
When we allow violence against some, we enable violence against all.
DaShanne Stokes
While in Bombay, I began, on one hand, my study of Indian law and, on the other, my experiments in dietetics in which Virchand Gandhi, a friend, joined me. My brother, for his part was trying his best to get me briefs. The study of India law was a tedious business. The Civil Procedure Code I could in no way get on with. Not so however, with the Evidence Act. Virchand Gandhi was reading for the Solicitor's Examination and would tell me all sorts of stories about Barristers and Vakils.
Mahatma Gandhi
The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect--even if rejected--enrich and enlarge one's view of existence. Deadlier still, to the artist who lacks models, is the curse of ridicule, the bringing to bear on an artist's best work, especially his or her most original, most strikingly deviant, only a fund of ignorance and the presumption that as an artist's critic one's judgement is free of the restrictions imposed by prejudice, and is well informed, indeed, about all the art in the world that really matters.
Alice Walker
Hard times' is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's 'hard times' were made harder by them.
Alice Walker
Love is an expression of power. We can use it to transform our world.
Ericka Huggins
The intelligence of women is not out in the world, acting on its own behalf; it is kept small, inside the home, acting on behalf of another. This is true even when the woman works outside the home, because she is segregated into women's work, and her intelligence does not have the same importance as the lay of her ass.
Andrea Dworkin
Comport yourself with grace under pressure.
Bryant McGill
He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don't like me cause I'm a man?I blow my nose. take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss 'em, as far as I'm concern, frogs is what they stay.
Alice Walker
A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
Simone Weil
An unshared life is not living. He who shares does not lessen but great-ens his life.
Stephen S. Wise
Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.
Nelson Mandela
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
Helen Keller
We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.
Rebecca Solnit
I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren't done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise?
Rebecca Solnit
So, go. Travel far. Travel courageously. Travel young.
Alanda Kariza
Why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein’s wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don’t forge to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet paper before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor.
Betty Friedan
You don’t want modesty, you want humility. Humility comes from inside out. It says someone was here before me and I’m here because I’ve been paid for. I have something to do and I will do that because I’m paying for someone else who has yet to come.
Maya Angelou
In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. 79 Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the women’s prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts.
Angela Y. Davis
We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe.When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each others' throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.
Arundhati Roy
...the naive forms of Christian moral motivation - bare threats of hell and the bribery of heaven - stunt moral growth by ensuring believers remain emotional children, never achieving the cognitive moral development of adults. Psychologists have established that mature adults are moral not because of bare threats and bribes (that stage of moral development typifies children, not adults), but because they care about the effects their behavior has on themselves and others.
Richard C. Carrier
SHOW THE WORLD YOUR STRONG COMPASSION: GIVE YOUR VOICE TO VOICELESS YAZIDI GIRLS!
Widad Akreyi
I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.
Mahatma Gandhi
Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies.
Jane Jacobs
It wasn't what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows shaded it. No mists rolled over it. No birds circled it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily, her clear view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one small wish perhaps it would have been Not to Know, Not to know what each day had in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend.
Arundhati Roy
Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal...
Rebecca Solnit
Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'One grand boulevard with treeswith one grand cafe in sunwith strong black coffee in very small cups.One not necessarily very beautifulman or woman who loves you.One fine day.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Good things come to us just when we need them the most, like an angel throwing us a life-preserver before we go under the waters of despair.
Bryant McGill
Love. And again, see I don't mean, I think love is that condition in the human spirit so profund, that it allows us to forgive, and it may be the energy which keeps the stars in the firmament, I'm not sure. It may be the energy which keeps the blood running smoothly through our veins. I'm not sure, but it's something beyond the explanation. It can be used for anything you can explain. Any good thing you can explain.
Maya Angelou
I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.
Russell Brand
Everyone has a home but me.
Gloria Steinem
It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood--and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes.
Betty Friedan
Touch Me, but not with your hands.
Orville Lloyd Douglas
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE...AND BEG EVERYONE...TO BE A HERO... AND SAVE THE YAZIDI NATION
Widad Akreyi
Fear is the greatest enemy; the father of all suffering, and love is the only cure for humanity's great afflictions
Bryant McGill
You have a chance to save lives! If you don't take it, you may regret it!
Widad Akreyi
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. I hold that the more helpless a creature the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of humankind.
Mahatma Gandhi
Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.
Maya Angelou
We must primarily become seekers of God instead of founders of works, for work will not sustain us through the traumas of incarnation.
Viv Grigg
In forgiving others, I free myself towards belonging and wholeness, be it with the person I am forgiving, or with myself.
Sharon Weil
I’ve read Hamlet, I know men suffer.
Andrea Dworkin
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.
James Baldwin
The rain begins with a single drop
Manal Al-Sharif
The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks. But it's also a choose-your-own-adventure story.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
We couldn't possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.
Betty Friedan
I have come to realize that in life and politics, there is always more to take into consideration.
Michael Bronski
Cultivate clarity, strength, vitality and power from natural, beautiful and organic living foods.
Bryant McGill
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Martin Luther King Jr.
I couldn't tell fact from fiction,Or if the dream was trueMy only sure predictionIn this world was you.I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.
Maya Angelou
That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the old Norse ‘los’ meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places… I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.
Rebecca Solnit
You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
James Baldwin
When you realize that the feeling you have — is — the response you choose, you are free in that moment.
Bryant McGill
Talk without the support of action means nothing.
DaShanne Stokes
You are worthless to others if you don't know your own self and self-worth.
Bryant McGill