Quotes by Activists - Page 83

Instead of seeing how much pain I can dish out towards those I disagree with, or who I believe have done me wrong, I seek to follow the golden rule and use my words and behavior to create more of what the world needs – love, compassion, and connection.
Aspen Baker
We must be kind and gentle gardeners with people and nature.
Bryant McGill
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
Mahatma Gandhi
I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you...And you...And you...Gotta give em hope.
Harvey Milk
If you truly pour your heart into what you believe in, even if it makes you vulnerable, amazing things can and will happen.
Emma Watson
I am often asked whether physical aggression by women toward men, such as a slap in the face, is abuse. The answer is: “It depends.” Men typically experience women’s shoves or slaps as annoying and infuriating rather than intimidating, so the long-term emotional effects are less damaging. It is rare to find a man who has gradually lost his freedom or self-esteem because of a woman’s aggressiveness.
Lundy Bancroft
Rich People plan for three generationsPoor people plan for Saturday night
Gloria Steinem
Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance
Derrick Jensen
Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.
Naomi Wolf
I hold that it is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others'religions as we would have them to respect our own, a friendly study of theworld's religions is a sacred duty.
Mahatma Gandhi
Our lives preserved. How it was and how it will be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.
Toni Cade Bambara
Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
Rebecca Solnit
When we become acquainted with any person on a human level, even a great enemy, we begin to see that no person is really so different from ourselves.
Bryant McGill
If you want to run for Prime Minister, you can. If you don’t, that’s wonderful, too. Shave your armpits, don’t shave them, wear flats one day, heels the next. These things are so irrelevant and surface to what it is all really about, and I wish people wouldn’t get caught up in that. We want to empower women to do exactly what they want, to be true to themselves, to have the opportunities to develop.
Emma Watson
You know how I say, ‘Don’t ask anyone how to get somewhere unless they have been there?’ Well, I have been there – I have written, been published, found success, and experienced self-doubt, frustration, anger and disappointment along the way … But you know what? I have not been to the place you’re going to. This is your journey. Your destination. Disregard everything in this book. Or embrace it. Better yet: cherry pick. It’s your life.
Catherine Deveny
The law was good, Paul wrote, and its purpose vital. But its purpose was also temporary. Once Christ fulfilled the law, his followers would have trivialized his sacrifice by living as though they were still subject to the law's constraints.
Matthew Vines
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
Audre Lorde
We elected a man who knows how to build walls when we needed someone who knows how to build bridges.
DaShanne Stokes
First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man
Alice Walker
If your options are closing-in around you and you feel panicked, scared and helpless, this is the time for action.
Bryant McGill
When I dare to be powerful--to use my strength in the service of my vision--then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde
No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.
Naomi Wolf
Seek not greater wealth, but simpler pleasure; not higher fortune, but deeper felicity.
Mahatma Gandhi
The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
Simone Weil
We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)
Elie Wiesel
I like driving cab. Receptionists, sales clerks, waitresses -- they all have to look pleasant all the time. I can snarl if I want. There ain't too many women who can do that. Maybe garment workers are allowed to snarl at their sewing machines. But women mostly have to look pleasant when they're fucking miserable, and smile when they're angry.
Helen Potrebenko
Suffering is one of life's great teachers.
Bryant McGill
Inside of a ring or out, ain’t nothing wrong with going down. It’s staying down that’s wrong.
Muhammad Ali
The fulcrum of resistance is in your mind where you pit yourself against the weight of the external.
Bryant McGill
Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five.
Laura Bates
Confronted with such flagrant acts of intolerance—such abuses of the freedom of speech—a free society must surely do more. For intolerance is the one thing a free society cannot afford to tolerate.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
If the people of God were to transform the world through fascination, these amazing teachings had to work at the center of these peculiar people. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then walk with that child a couple of miles. Look into the eys of tax collectors as they sue you in court; see their poverty and give them your coat. Look in to the eys of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love. For God loves good and bad people.
Shane Claiborne
Want is an empty void — your real value is full and abundant.
Bryant McGill
You can always hold out for something better when you know your self worth.
Bryant McGill
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James Baldwin
The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.
Rebecca Solnit
God does not seek the opinions of others about your life.
Bryant McGill
When we admit and deal with difference; when we deal with the deep bitterness; when we deal with the horror of even our different nightmares; when we turn them and look at them, it’s like looking at death: hard but possible. If you look at it directly without embracing it, then there is much less that you can ever be made to fear.
Audre Lorde
Look within - there is no end!
Malebo Sephodi
Even before you've gone anywhere, you feel like you've gone somewhere
Deborah Ellis
Outside of my professional life, I have known many couples over the years who had passion and electricity between them and who treated each other well. But unfortunately there is wide acceptance in our society of the unhealthy notion that passion and aggression are interwoven and that cruel verbal exchanges and bomblike explosions are the price you pay for a relationship that is exciting, deep, and sexy. Popular romantic movies and soap operas sometimes reinforce this image.
Lundy Bancroft
Each day has the potential of being your best day. You decide what each day will bring.
Paige Rawl
Isn't there a flaw in the logic of that phrase - speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn't know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth. Enron knows what it's doing. We don't have to tell it what it's doing. We have to tell other people what Enron is doing. Similarly, the people who are building the dams know what they're doing. The contractors know how much they're stealing. The bureaucrats know how much they're getting in bribes.Power knows the truth. There isn't any doubt about that. It is really about telling the story. Good fiction is the truest thing that ever there was. Facts are not necessarily the only truths. Facts can be fiddled with by economists and bankers. There are other kinds of truth. It's about telling the story. As a writer, that's the best thing I can do. It's not just about digging up facts.
Arundhati Roy
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance.
James Baldwin
The external only creates dependency.
Bryant McGill
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled wit it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -she was afreaid to ask even of herself the silent question- "Is this all?
Betty Friedan
This day I ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.
Elie Wiesel
Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?
Rebecca Solnit
This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders--orders which are in this case self-generated.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance.
Rebecca Solnit
We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
Audre Lorde
Revolution is not a one time event.
Audre Lorde
American society has willfully deleted the fact of homosexual behavior from its mind, laundering things as they come along, in order to maintain a more comfortable illusion. The censors removed it; the critics said, "Well, look! It isn't there"; and anyone who still saw it was labeled a pervert
Vito Russo
President Barack Obama and many liberal-minded commentators have been hesitant to call this Islamist ideology by its proper name. They seem to fear that both Muslim communities and the religiously intolerant will hear the word “Islam” and simply assume that all Muslims are being held responsible for the excesses of the jihadist few.I call this the Voldemort effect, after the villain in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Many well-meaning people in Ms. Rowling’s fictional world are so petrified of Voldemort’s evil that they do two things: They refuse to call Voldemort by name, instead referring to “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and they deny that he exists in the first place. Such dread only increases public hysteria, thus magnifying the appeal of Voldemort’s power.The same hysteria about Islamism is unfolding before our eyes. But no strategy intended to defeat Islamism can succeed if Islamism itself and its violent expression in jihadism are not first named, isolated and understood. From: Maajid Nawaz's article titled, 'How to Beat Islamic State', December 11th, 2015.
Maajid Nawaz
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
Helen Keller
At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women's "libbers", bra burners, and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters...that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a "postfeminist" age...
Gloria Steinem
The single greatest tool for making moral people commit atrocities is group affiliation. The single greatest tool for promoting global human rights and equality is to end group affiliation.
Heather Marsh
Shelley, you’re just like that oyster.” God confronted me on the deeper areas of my life that I wouldn’t let Him open up and heal. When Garrett saw me walk off alone over the sandy hills, he knew God was leading me to a healing moment. Standing on the edge of the salty waters of Puget Sound, I allowed God to reach into the darkest places in my heart and expose the ugly lies I believed about myself. Huge salty tears pouring out like waves, God assured me He threw my sins out as far as the east is from the west. The tremendous shame and guilt I carried for so many years was being literally washed away into the Pacific Ocean. I was no longer a broken child of sexual abuse but a cherished Champion daughter of the Most High God.
Shelley Lubben
Alone we can do so little together we can do so much.
Helen Keller
Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
James Baldwin