Quotes by Activists - Page 73

Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given.
Marian Wright Edelman
Do you know what we call windows in Belgrade?' she asked. All our windows are broken and crisscrossed with scotch tape. 'Windows 99.
Jasmina Tešanović
We must dilute and disperse all forms of concentrated power that refuse to be accountable to majority wishes.
Bryant McGill
You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [....] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Hate the sin, love the sinner.
Mahatma Gandhi
The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling.
Laura Bates
Only until all human beings begin to recognize themselves as human beings will prejudice be gone forever. People ask me what race I am, but there is no such thing as race. I just answer: "I’m a member of the human race.
Amelia Boynton Robinson
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker
The natural world is built upon common motifs and patterns. Recognizing patterns in nature creates a map for locating yourself in change, and anticipation what is yet to come.
Sharon Weil
But whatever However Whenever this ends I want you to know That right now I love you forever
Andrea Gibson
I want to thank you, Lord, for life and all that's in it. Thank you for the day and for the hour, and the minute.
Maya Angelou
There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.
Simone Weil
As I learned more about choice, and looked over the extensive evidence in all of the cases I had testified in, I realized that what was happening in the FLDS was human trafficking-both for labor and for sex. In mainstream society, money and lust are the currency. In the FLDS, salvation and position are the currency, but the forced acts of labor and sex are the same-the very definition of slavery. And whether greed or God is the currency, it is not right to own another's free agency.
Rebecca Musser
The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.
Arundhati Roy
If I had no sense of humor I should long ago have committed suicide.
Mahatma Gandhi
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
James Baldwin
The failure of reorientation therapy is why the "ex-gay" ministry Exodus International shut down in 2013. It places gay Christians who adhere to the traditional biblical interpretation in an agonizing, irresolvable tension. In order to truly flee from sin as well as the temptation to sin, they must constantly attempt what has proven impossible: to reconstitute themselves so they are no longer sexual beings at all.
Matthew Vines
Any defensiveness is a sign of failure. You can't move forward if you are defensive.
Bryant McGill
Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That’s the reason they call what us sing the devil’s music. Devils love to fuck.
Alice Walker
The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.
Nikki Giovanni
Information is controlled because the free flow of truth is not always expedient for those wishing to maintain control.
Bryant McGill
Peace": the fruit of justice done especially to the Self.
Alice Walker
You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.
Audre Lorde
When I was in my single digits, I was subjected to the worst torture you can possibly inflict on a child: Catholic mass.
Tyler Oakley
As sensory experience junkies, we have been blinded to the majesty in the common.
Bryant McGill
I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.
Nelson Mandela
Any decent society has to be built on trust and love and the intelligent use of information and feelings. Education involves being able to practice those things as you struggle to build a decent society that can be nonviolent.
Myles Horton
Witnessing honesty frightens some people because they haven't known authenticity in their own life.
Bryant McGill
There isn't a man on earth who doesn't at times pronounce an opinion on good and evil, even if it be only to find fault with somebody else.
Simone Weil
Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you.
Alice Walker
The most powerful tools of revolution through intention are humility and consciousness.
Bryant McGill
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Rebecca Solnit
To understand women who look both ways requires hearing their stories, not just noting the sex of their current partner. And when you listen closely, it's apparent these women have learned something crucial in these relationships.
Jennifer Baumgardner
The solution to nearly every problem in the world comes down to greater awareness, compassion, and empathy.
Bryant McGill
Success comes from finding your center and self.
Bryant McGill
It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In nearly all countries, including America, the truth is that women have a low social status, and are considered inferior.
Bryant McGill
Independent radical women often live lonely lives if they expect equality.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Those who see the world through the lens of love are the true visionaries.
Bryant McGill
Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him 'Touch' me again. Then, when he 'Touched' me, I thought, it doesn't matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the 'Touch' of hands, of Giovanni's hands, or anybody's hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.
James Baldwin
A friend may be waiting behind a stranger's face.
Maya Angelou
I don’t have perfect teeth. I’m not stick thin. I want to be the person who feels great in her body and can say that she loves it and doesn’t want to change anything.
Emma Watson
Want and belief in lack shrink your opportunities.
Bryant McGill
I've never had a humble opinion in my life. If you're going to have one why bother to be humble about it?
Joan Baez
The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.
Derrick Jensen
The Arts are the only acceptable theatre of war for peace.
Bryant McGill
The teacher can only provide the lessons, but the student ultimately decides what to learn.
Bryant McGill
For me, those weeks in Boston, with Wilma, became a lesson in her ability to be “of good mind,” in her phrase, which also meant a people’s ability to survive.
Gloria Steinem
The starting point to freedom is to begin questioning the cultural narrative you have been sold.
Bryant McGill
Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.
Russell Brand
We have all suffered losses and pain, but no loss is greater than a life lost holding-on to a painful past.
Bryant McGill
But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in
Arundhati Roy
The power of getting to know one another is so immense, eclipsed only by first getting to know ourselves.
Bryant McGill
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together… Their relationship depended on her restraint… The premise of their affair, or the basis of their comedy, was that they were two independent people, who needed each other for a time, who would always be friends, but who, probably, would not always be lovers. Such a premise forbids the intrusion of the future, or too vivid an exhibition of need.
James Baldwin
Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.
Bryant McGill
When you give others a new chance, a new chance is really being given to you.
Bryant McGill
God is the reason I’m surviving, but he’s sure used you in my life wonderfully. I love you.
Esther Earl
I dreamt that I took William Burrough’s penis and tied it up with piano wire. I hung him like a Chagall painting…In the next part J.G. Ballard swam through streets of female urine. The girls read his book Crash and then mowed him down with their Volkswagen, crushing his chest slowly against a brick wall. As he screamed in agony larger than representation can accommodate, they referred to his text and had orgasms. Later, they jumped up and down yelling, ‘You’re not a hero. You’re not a hero. You’re not. You’re not. You’re not.’ ““How do you analyze that part of the dream, Anna?”…”I guess I’m nervous about my birthday.
Sarah Schulman
And in most queer communities, regardless of one's sex or identity, people who are more masculine in gender expression are almost always viewed as more valid and attractive than their feminine counterparts.
Julia Serano
Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.
Naomi Wolf
Google's colourful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year - an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.
Julian Assange