Quotes by Activists - Page 79

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name. No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming... As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect.
Andrea Dworkin
I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.
Mahatma Gandhi
Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on the prize ahead. Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don’t need to or can’t go down it. You can. We have.
Rebecca Solnit
It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one's acts.
Mahatma Gandhi
We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.
Naomi Wolf
Every positive thought is a silent prayer which will change your life.
Bryant McGill
Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.
John Perkins
Your suffering is there to inspect you and perfect you. We are made complete by our pain.
Bryant McGill
Most of the barbaric and vicious acts of terror committed against innocent civilians around the world in the last thirty years have been done by Muslims. They have even carried out more bombings than the less-publicized Hindu Tamil Tiger separatists, who have committed more than two hundred suicide attacks in Sri Lanka. It is a fact that the nineteen terrorists who hijacked airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, were Muslims who practiced the teachings of the Koran and sought mental fortitude in its verses as their planes crashed.
Brigitte Gabriel
The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . . Memories of mother drying my tears, reading aloud, cutting cookies and singing as she did, listening to prayers I said as I knelt with my forehead pressed against her knee, tucking me in bed and turning down the light. They have carried me through the years and given my life such a firm foundation that it does not rock beneath flood or tempest.
Margaret Sanger
Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).
Simone Weil
On Love - Love without trust is the love you give a dog. You may call that cute little mutt a member of the family but you don't let him in the kitchen when there's a roast on the table.
Marsha Hinds
You are the first person who you should treat with humility. Respect yourself and let it overflow to others.
Bryant McGill
Zen movement is a meditative practice.
Bryant McGill
Pleasure feels better than pain. Make the pursuit of pleasure your guide.
Sharon Weil
Life is a practice. When you 'fail,' you can immediately begin practicing again.
Bryant McGill
Something is reflecting our thoughts back to us in obvious and not so obvious ways.
Bryant McGill
The satyagrahi enters the jail cell as the bridegroom enters the bridal chamber
M.K Gandhi
Please God, when I open my eyes, make this nightmare disappear.
Catherine Jane Fisher
When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his partner of plotting to harm him, he seems paranoid. It is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill. Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically “normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.
Lundy Bancroft
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
Simone Weil
One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say.
Bryant McGill
Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.
Gloria Steinem
There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one's own virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that comes from pleasure denied. The bleakness of the world is required as contrasting backdrop to the drama of their rising above.
Rebecca Solnit
WHILE THE WORLD'S ASLEEP, ANGELS REFUSE TO SLEEP!
Widad Akreyi
I am convinced Socialism is the only answer and I urge all comrades to take this struggle to a victorious conclusion. Only this will free us from the chains of bigotry and exploitation.
Malala Yousafzai
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.
Cory Doctorow
Love exalts because it is exalted.
Bryant McGill
most Americans think of Rosa Parks as a demur, pleasant-enough seamstress who backed into history by being too tired to get out of her seat on a bus one day, in reality she had been trained in nonviolence spirit and tactics at a famous institution, Highlander Folk School. It seems to be a difficult concept for most of us that peace is a skill that can be learned. We know war can be learned, but we seem to think that one becomes a peacemaker by a mere change of heart. (23)
Mahatma Gandhi
One way to be sure you are not making the wrong decision, is to lookvertically upwards
Oche Otorkpa
Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement, not till he’s shown his colors, run the people, making laws. Experience, there’s the test.
Nelson Mandela
WE KNOW YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY DARKNESS... IN THE TERROR FOREST! WE HOPE FOR MOONLIGHT!
Widad Akreyi
When we hide discrimination under the guise of 'religious freedom,' we make a mockery of human rights.
DaShanne Stokes
The Family is the Country of the heart. There is an angel in the Family who by the mysterious influence of grace of sweetness and of love renders the fulfillment of duties less wearisome sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys unmixed with sadness.
Giuseppe Mazzini
Some men, under the pressure of incarceration, showed true mettle, while others revealed themselves as less than what they had appeared to be.
Nelson Mandela
Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.
Eli Clare
I dreamt we walked together along the shore. We made satisfying small talk and laughed. This morning I found sand in my shoe and a seashell in my pocket. Was I only dreaming?
Maya Angelou
Oh judge! Your damn laws! The good people don't need them, and the bad people don't obey them.
Ammon Hennacy
I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there
James Baldwin
Oh, and 13.1 million American people had their homes foreclosed. Because their debt, it turns out, was real; it was only the debt within the financial sector that was imaginary. It was only the people who generated the crisis who got three magical wishes from an economic genie. There was no abracadabra for ordinary people; they just got abraca-fucked.
Russell Brand
Loneliness will give you the greatest chance of ever having a beautiful relationship with another person.
Bryant McGill
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
Arundhati Roy
People were not getting back what they wanted for their sold labor. Taxes grew and services shrank. Prices rose and quality decayed. Everywhere people felt used and betrayed and coerced and cheated.
Marge Piercy
To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.
Nelson Mandela
Let me also say I wanna make you sandwhiches,And soup,And peanut butter cookies,Though, the truth is peanutbutter is actually really bad for you 'cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil,But hey, you like peanutbutter and I like you!
Andrea Gibson
What the proponents of prostitution conveniently ignore is that lack of opportunity is lack of choice.
Rachel Moran
If wealth is a magnet, poverty is a kind of repellent.
Nelson Mandela
You can fuck me if you want," she said. "I know a man needs to be able to say thank you - and words don't always come so easy.
Sharon Weil
There is no greater intelligence than kindness and empathy.
Bryant McGill
I believe sarcasm is the passive form of rudeness and should not be tolerated in the Body of Christ.
Sean Feucht
We learn the inner secret of happiness when we learn to direct our inner drives our interest and our attention to something besides ourselves.
Ethel Percy Andrus
Open the bloom of your heart and become a gift of beauty to the world.
Bryant McGill
Quietly endure, silently suffer and patiently wait.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The past has given us much too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and the organization control; between the "come one, come all" of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put off and flogging the dead horse of how planting carrots is enough to leave this nightmare.
The Invisible Committee
Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.
Andrea Gibson
Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.
Gloria Steinem
You would not believe what skill, power and ability your total intelligence possesses until you lose your balance.
Bryant McGill
When we want to talk, we can instead listen, and let our attentiveness to another's need to speak be our silent statement.
Bryant McGill
In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest.
Arundhati Roy
The secret to unseating great power, is not to move the other direction, but to compete directly against their goals.
Bryant McGill