Quotes by Activists - Page 71

Be a believer in true love. Seek deep communication with others and with yourself.
Bryant McGill
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.
Rebecca Solnit
All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.
Alice Walker
When will women not be compelledto view their bodies as science projects,gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained?When will a woman ceaseto be made of pain?
Marge Piercy
Some people have abusive, negative, controlling tendencies in their blood; they are wired for havoc, bickering and deception.
Bryant McGill
Someone's forgiveness will not heal you; condemnation or absolution is their test, not yours.
Bryant McGill
One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.
Malala Yousafzai
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
James Baldwin
Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
Simone Weil
He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
Elie Wiesel
I believe that theology is facing the abyss.I must face the abyss, the abyss of existence, the abyss of mystery. (Rubem Alves, p. 189)
Mev Puleo
All men are created equal. Now matter how hard they try, they can never erase those words. That is what America is about.
Harvey Milk
DeLois lived up the block on 142nd Street and never had her hair done, and all the neighbourhood women sucked their teeth as she walked by. Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud stomach moved her on down the block while I watched, not caring whether or not she was a poem.
Audre Lorde
If the goal of feminism is to end patriarchy and gender-based oppression, then transgender politics supplies us one of the most important perspectives from which to view - and challenge - binary gender and gender-based oppression. As mentioned in previous chapters, if no clear distinction exists between "male" and "female," it becomes impossible to oppress people according to their gender. If we have no sole criterion for determining who is "man" and who is "woman," we can't know whose role it is to be oppressor, and whose to be oppressed.
Shiri Eisner
When people are treated like a product, they become obsessed with materialism.
Bryant McGill
Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.
Rebecca Solnit
If men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.
Florynce Kennedy
Corporations are not legal “persons” with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.
Kalle Lasn
We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into life.-Martin Luther King Jr.
Maya Angelou
The master tools of success are invitation, patience, time, gentleness, cooperation and surrender.
Bryant McGill
Heirlooms we don't have in our family. But stories we've got.
Rose Chernin
There is something beautiful in you seeking freedom.
Bryant McGill
You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
Dan Barker
In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes fro unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.
Julia Serano
Pain is the clarion of aliveness trumpeting that you are living in the marvelous tender cause of life!
Bryant McGill
As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, "Hate generalizes, love specifies". Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.
Gloria Steinem
and when we speak we are afraidour words will not be heardnor welcomedbut when we are silentwe are still afraidSo it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive
Audre Lorde
The acceptable is unacceptable. The truth is a lie. The good is pure evil. Even freedom has become a prison.
Bryant McGill
But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.
Audre Lorde
We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world
Helen Keller
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.
Starhawk
We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.
Helen Keller
Women, it is said, possess corresponding power. Through consciousness-raising, women found that women's so-called power was the other side of female powerlessness. A women's supposed power to deny sex is the underside of her actual lack of power to stop it. Women's supposed power to get men to do things for them by nagging or manipulating is the other side of the power they lack to have their every need anticipated, to carry out the task themselves, or to invoke physical fear to gain compliance with their desires without even having to mention it. Once the veil is lifted, once relations between the sexes are seen as power relations, it becomes impossible to see as simply unintented, well-intentioned, or innocent the actions through which women are told every day what is expected and when they have crossed some line.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
There is something divine, mystical, magical and unexplainable in the universe that is listening and responding to each of us.
Bryant McGill
The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had been morally conquered by the enemy.
David McReynolds
Freedom is the most sophisticated form of control. The best lies use the truth.
Bryant McGill
Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
Marian Wright Edelman
The supreme hallmark of reality is balance.
Bryant McGill
Sometimes doing what's right for your conscience is not always the most popular decision, but I can guarantee that in retrospect you won't regret the choice you made.
Tyler Oakley
Your crown has been bought and paid for. Put it on your head and wear it.
Maya Angelou
Even when someone hurts you, you choose how to struggle, resist, deny and receive.
Bryant McGill
If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.
Simone Weil
I close my eyes and melt in its embrace, basking in the sweetest balm of forgiveness: that for which one need not even ask.
Leslie Cannold
Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.
Rebecca Solnit
The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.
Elie Wiesel
We write history with our feet and with our presece and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.
Rebecca Solnit
If you can't be who you really are then what is life but an unbearable lie?
Bryant McGill
It is possible to refine awareness itself so much that the emptiness of things, and the role mental construction plays, becomes a directly apprehended reality.
Jay Michaelson
If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
James Baldwin
Policemen always call me a stupid bitch, and I deny that I'm stupid.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
My mother always says when you fight destiny, destiny fights back. Some things, they're just written in the stars. You can try but you can never escape what's meant to be.
Aisha Saeed
When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people.
Arundhati Roy
Rory, I want to say that death is what you've always wanted. But that can't be the Truth. [This time] we can blame it on me. I'll be the packing mule, carry all the burden. & you, you can be a child again; fold your church hands like dirty laundry [crease them tight]. Nobody has to know about us, not my fathernor yours --No, not even God
Christopher Soto
One by one, these disciples would infect the nations with grace. It wasn't a call to take the sword or the throne and force the world to bow. Rather, they were to live the contagious love of God, to woo the nations into a new future.
Shane Claiborne
A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but it's lowest ones
Nelson Mandela
the church was an international institution long before globalization.
Shane Claiborne
All this under a magnificent blue sky.
Elie Wiesel
Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.
Naomi Wolf
You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.
Mary Tyler Moore
When you succumb to cynicism, darkness, pessimism and sarcasm you are amplifying imbalance and negativity.
Bryant McGill