Quotes by Activists - Page 82

The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect.More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation.
Naomi Wolf
The future depends on what you do today.
Mahatma Gandhi
We create in people through our actions and example. In this way people around us become reflections of our own behavioral patterns and internal energies
Bryant McGill
All the things that are worth doing, take time.
Mos Def
Surround yourself with beautiful and positive people, who love you and believe in you.
Bryant McGill
Real limitations can be reasonably challenged and expanded, but a hobbled mind is not going anywhere.
Bryant McGill
Knowledge is that possession that no misfortune can destroy, no authority can revoke, and no enemy can control. This makes knowledge the greatest of all freedoms.
Bryant McGill
We attract what we are. We attract who we are.
Bryant McGill
No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
Audre Lorde
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.
Simone Weil
Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.
Elie Wiesel
It is in the center of a stable self-love that you will find the confidence and safety you want.
Bryant McGill
The simple rhythms of nature are calling you. Let them wash away the clutter and distractions from your false life.
Bryant McGill
An new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.
Marge Piercy
Life is a game that you win when you solve the puzzle of yourself.
Bryant McGill
Education -- whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people, or even oneself -- consists in creating motives. To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good -- that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried out in the absence of motives capable of supplying the indispensable amount of energy for its execution.
Simone Weil
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Prejudice is learned. What will you teach others through your actions and words?
DaShanne Stokes
When the Majority of jokes made at the expense of trans people center on "men wearing dresses" or "men who want their penises cut off" that is not transphobia- it is trans-misogyny. When the majority of violence and sexual assaults omitted against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia- it is trans-misogyny.
Julia Serano
My first interview was with eighty-eight-year-old folk artist Marcia Muth… ‘Your life does change as you get older,’ she told me. ‘You get into what’s important and what’s not’.
Ashton Applewhite
I’m sure I am wrong about many things, although I’m not sure exactly which things I’m wrong about. I’m even sure I’m wrong about what I think I’m right about in at least some cases.
Brian D. McLaren
Nobody can hurt me without my permission.
Mahatma Gandhi
It’s a wonder of human behavior: we build our own handcuffs that trap and harm us. We create the myth, and we honor it. We tell the lie, and we believe it.
Raif Badawi
You can become instantly successful with a simple thought, but long-lasting and pronounced success comes to those who renew their commitment to a mindset of abundance every minute of every hour of every day.
Bryant McGill
People who have trouble questioning their own country often have trouble admitting fault in themselves, both of which come from insecurity and lack of humility.
Bryant McGill
Addiction is just a little hiding place where sensitive people can go so we don't have to be touched by love or pain.
Glennon Doyle Melton
We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.
Audre Lorde
A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done
Marge Piercy
The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.
Helen Keller
Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those things in balance
Julian Assange
No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
Helen Keller
You have the heart of a warrior and you were designed to survive!
Bryant McGill
By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.
Eli Pariser
Now I am writing this diary in English, which for me is not the language of intimacy or love, but an attempt at distance and sanity, a means of recalling normality.
Jasmina Tešanović
Reliving your painful past will poison your heart and your tomorrow.
Bryant McGill
Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid,more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness.
Helen Keller
Every time you feel great anger, stop and write down who or what caused your feelings and why you reacted so angrily. The goal is to get to the root of the anger. Only when you understand the source can you find a solution.
Arun Gandhi
If you love your country, you must be willing to defend it from fraud, bigotry, and recklessness--even from a president.
DaShanne Stokes
It is only in the giving of oneself to others that we truly live.
Ethel Percy Andrus
The single thing all women need in the world is inspiration, and inspiration comes from storytelling.
Zainab Salbi
The temptationTo take the precious things we have apartTo see how they workMust be resisted for they never fit together
Billy Bragg
We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.
James Baldwin
[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.
Jane Jacobs
A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.
Simone Weil
He saw clearly, immediately, that the man didn't care about the gift's value, didn't care about the gift even, but cared profoundly for the act of receiving as though the gift were a tribute, a confirmation of his self, his being, his reality. He found no pleasure in what he was taking but in the act of taking itself.
Ninotchka Rosca
The fullness of life's balancing grace will demand the symmetry of recompense for all your loss and pain.
Bryant McGill
Conquest was once over the outer territories, but the new conquest is for the inner-territories of our hearts.
Bryant McGill
The self-realized spirit is merely a spirit emancipated from fear, judgement and knowing.
Bryant McGill
I realized that it was not as easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it. And since then, whenever I have heard of someone threatening to commit suicide, it has had little or no effect on me.
Mahatma Gandhi
The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane.
Mahatma Gandhi
I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.
Gloria Steinem
Peace does not mean an absence of conflict, because opposition, polarity and conflict are natural and universal laws.
Bryant McGill
From this day onward whatever circumstances may jam my way I'll break through it unscathed for in the end who will but suffer but me, so much so that I will reach for the unreachable, I'll break that which is unbreakable and attain that is impossible!
Liliosa Hilao
Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence ... I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor...
Mahatma Gandhi
To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.
Arundhati Roy
Once I accepted my own transexuality, then it became obvious to me that the question "Why do transsexuals exist?" is not a matter of pure curiosity, but rather an act of nonacceptance, as it invariably occurs in the absence of asking the reciprocal question: "Why do cissexuals exist?" The unceasing search to uncover the cause of transexuality is designed to keep transsexual gender identities in a perpetually questionable state, thereby ensuring that cissexual gender identities continue to be unquestionable.
Julia Serano
The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.
Frances Moore Lappé
You have to accept that you'll never be good enough for some people. Whether that is going to be your problem or theirs is up to you.
Bryant McGill