Quotes by Activists - Page 8

When Great Trees FallWhen great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,lions hunker downin tall grasses,and even elephantslumber after safety.When great trees fallin forests,small things recoil into silence,their senseseroded beyond fear.When great souls die,the air around us becomeslight, rare, sterile.We breathe, briefly.Our eyes, briefly,see witha hurtful clarity.Our memory, suddenly sharpened,examines,gnaws on kind wordsunsaid,promised walksnever taken.Great souls die andour reality, bound tothem, takes leave of us.Our souls,dependent upon theirnurture,now shrink, wizened.Our minds, formedand informed by theirradiance,fall away.We are not so much maddenedas reduced to the unutterable ignoranceof dark, coldcaves.And when great souls die,after a period peace blooms,slowly and alwaysirregularly. Spaces fillwith a kind ofsoothing electric vibration.Our senses, restored, neverto be the same, whisper to us.They existed. They existed.We can be. Be and bebetter. For they existed.
Maya Angelou
In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. this is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the word or in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you're in trouble and maybe that there's a cover-up.
Rebecca Solnit
A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.
Cherríe L. Moraga
Love always was and always will be the only real answer. Why else do you think we have been taught so much hate?
Bryant McGill
Crime must be brought under control... Freedom without civility, freedom without the ability to live in peace, was not true freedom at all.
Nelson Mandela
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Helen Keller
The important thing is to convince people to make and share useful things. Fighting with greedy douches who don't share doesn't do that. Making more, living under conditions of abundance, that does it.
Cory Doctorow
Coexistence and personal peace are at the heart of global peace and harmony.
Widad Akreyi
Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.
Mahatma Gandhi
The country is dying cause of an lack of men, not a lack of programms.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
Let's tell the truth to people. When people ask, 'How are you?' have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avaoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don't want to know about yours. But think of it this way: If people avoid you, you will have more time to meditate and do fine research on a cure for whatever truly afflicts you.
Maya Angelou
Political correctness' as 'over-sensitivity' is code for saying the privileged shouldn't have their unearned privileges questioned.
DaShanne Stokes
The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that 'justice is what love looks like in public.' I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.
Naomi Klein
Real success sometimes involves saying no to growth, expansion and gain.
Bryant McGill
Democracy doesn't mean spreading terror.
DaShanne Stokes
Our favourite amusement during that winter was tobogganing. In places the shore of the lake rises abruptly from the water's edge. Down these steep slopes we used to coast. We would get on our toboggan, a boy would give us a shove, and off we went! Plunging through drifts, leaping hollows, swooping down upon the lake, we would shoot across its gleaming surface to the opposite bank. What joy! What exhilarating madness! For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine!
Helen Keller
Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop..."an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!
Naomi Wolf
Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.
Russell Brand
Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.
Tim Wise
In life, we make the best decisions we can with the information we have on hand.
Agnes Kamara-umunna
When you don’t stop evil in its tracks when you first recognize it, you will end up with a monster force that will spread its tentacles and affect the lives of millions. Because we did not want to judge evildoers such as the Palestinians bombing innocent Israelis, the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein gassing his own people, we have helped create the monsters we are dealing with today. Don’t be afraid to stand up and lift your head and be proud of what America and Western culture stand for. America did not pull itself out of the grip of tyranny and feudalism for nothing. America as a Western culture and as a nation is a tribute to men and women and God’s creation at its best.
Brigitte Gabriel
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us...During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty...pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal...More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.
Naomi Wolf
Be not discouraged black women of the world, but push forward, regardless of the lack of appreciation shown you.
Amy Jacques-Garvey
The nature of Nature is change.
Sharon Weil
In that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering, while learning not to inflict it on others, is part of the work we’re all here to do. So is love, which comes in so many forms and can be directed at so many things.
Rebecca Solnit
With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.
Simone Weil
My Life is My Message
Mahatma Gandhi
The conventional term is "mystical experience," meaning something that by its very nature lies beyond the reach of language, except for some vague verbal hand-wavings about "mystery" and "transcendence." As far as I was concerned - as a rationalist, an atheist, a scientist by training - this was the realm of gods and fairies and of no use to the great human project of trying to retain a foothold on the planet for future generations.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
James Baldwin
The more spiritually aware you become the more you will focus on your own self and less on others.
Bryant McGill
Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't.
Gloria Steinem
Your power and brilliance is the the most awesome force life could muster.
Bryant McGill
She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic - who forgot the candles, who broke the wine glasses, who forgot the ring. Who made love to her with a passion that took her breath away. She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting, thick-waisted, thick ankled girl. Not bad-looking. Not special. But when she was with Chacko, old limits were pushed back. Horizons expanded.She had never before met a man who spoke of the workd - of what it was, and how it came to be, or what he thought would become of it - in the way in which other men she knew discussed their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach.Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country, into the vast extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them - as though it lay before thm like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
Arundhati Roy
We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.
Bryant McGill
You have to do some thinking and know who you are, and then you have to resist compromising your truth for the comfort of others.
Bryant McGill
Singing with children in the schools has been the most rewarding experience of my life.
Pete Seeger
The world is starving for leaders who are not afraid to dismantle the sacred and precious beliefs, which hold us as prisoners of the past.
Bryant McGill
A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.
James Baldwin
Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.
Dan Barker
Allah is the Greatest. I'm just the greatest boxer
Muhammad Ali
Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.
Helen Keller
Hate controls everything it touches, but love sets everything it touches free.
Bryant McGill
Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.
Mahatma Gandhi
Some people have sex by putting fishhooks in each other. Couple this act with a simple understanding of the basic function of all living creatures to expand and contract. Now, try that with fishhooks.
Sarah Schulman
What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.
Helen Keller
The first question we must address deals with optimism, the possibility of achieving our goal. Are we in a position where we can actually hope to effect change? Assuming we become convinced that there are reasons for optimism, we move to the next question. Are we cetain that we want change? The stories about EHMs, jackals, and suffering around the globe strike raw nerves, but now we demand absolute proof that our grievances justify the efforts change will demand. Third: Is there a unifying principle that will validate our efforts? We look to ascertain that we are not merely seeking to impose our moral, religious, or philosophical values on others but instead are intent on creating something of true and lasting universal benefit. And finally: What can we each do? You and I personally need to evaluate our talents and passions. What are our individual options and desires? How do they fit into the bigger picture?
John Perkins
Death changes us, the living. In the presence of death, we become more aware of life.... It can inspire us to decide what really matters in life--and then to seek it. (Founder of M.A.D.D.)
Candy Lightner
When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women's passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.
Betty Friedan
Minimalism means not trying to improve perfection.
Bryant McGill
Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
Alice Walker
Genius is always accompanied by enthusiasm.
Bryant McGill
You do it for yourself. You don’t expect to change the world. You don’t even expect to influence your family or your friends. You do it because you can’t not do it and be who you are. Or who you’re meant to be.
Martin Sheen
And that’s the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that’s done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscious off and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials that they have this aura of legitimacy an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system then through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich, legal, Sacco and Vanzetti, quite legal, the Haymarket defendants, legal, the hundreds of rape trials throughout the south where black men were condemned to death all legal, Jesus legal, Socrates legal and that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext.
William M. Kunstler
only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how, And how much.
Arundathi Roy
Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?
Mahatma Gandhi
Seek not outside yourself heaven is within.
Mary Lou Cook
Nationalism is form of collective narcissism, where the citizens possess an inflated self-love of "their own people," to the exclusion of other human beings.
Bryant McGill
Beyond the clumsy, brute force tools of will, determination and hard work — and free from the heavy attachment of want, and the illusions of burden and blocks, is the true technology of creation through beingness.
Bryant McGill
REJECT THE LIES AND VIOLENCE. STAND FOR LOVE, TRUTH, DECENCY AND THE COMMON GOOD.
Bryant McGill
Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.
Muhammad Ali