Quotes by Activists - Page 10

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies. (from "Loving Your Enemies")

Martin Luther King Jr.

Animal welfare - yes. Animal rights - don't make me laugh. I'm not an animals rights activist. I certainly do not love animals. In fact, I secretly mistrust all four-legged / furry / two-winged / feathered / shelled ar scaly brothers and sisters. If I were them, I would by now be plotting ultimate revenge on a scale previously unknown to man. ... I stick to a vegan diet only for reasons of self-preservertion. Call it insurance. When the time of the great animal uprising comes, I may have a small chance of escaping ...

Sharon Dodua Otoo

Severability is an important concept in the context of the relations between this Court and Parliament; like 'reading down', it is an instrument of judicial restraint which reduces the danger of producing an overbroad judicial reaction to overbroad legislation.

Albie Sachs

The inherent prejudice in unnaturally-produced nationalism causes a form of cultural blindness, which prevents us from seeing the obvious ways we could co-exist in the world as a co-operative human family.

Bryant McGill

We begin to understand that to coparent is to one day look up and notice that you are on a roller coaster with another human being. You are in the same car, strapped down side by side and you can never, ever get off. There will never be another moment in your lives when your hearts don't rise and fall together, when your minds don't race and panic together, when your stomachs don't churn in tandem, when you stop seeing huge hills emerge in the distance and simultaneously grab the side of the car and hold on tight. No one except for the one strapped down beside you will ever understand the particular thrills and terrors of your ride.

Glennon Doyle Melton

Few, if any, survive their teens.

Maya Angelou

Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Marge Piercy

The idea that "femininity is artificial" is also blatantly misogynistic. Just as woman is man's "other", so too is femininity masculinity's "other". Under such circumstances, negative connotations like "artificial", "contrived", and "frivolous" become built into our understanding of femininity - indeed, this is precisely what allows masculinity to always come off as "natural", "practical" and "uncomplicated".

Julia Serano

Political prisoners describe:- extreme physical and emotional torture- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality- sham killings- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death- being forced to witness abusive acts on others- being forced to make impossible "choices"- boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment- hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks- being forced to hurt othersRitual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.

Laurie Matthew

You telling me God love you, and you ain't never done nothing for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that?But if God love me, Celie, I don't have to do all that. Unless I want to. There's a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. Like what? I ast. Oh, she say. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time. Well, this sounds like blasphemy sure nuff. She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

Alice Walker

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals.

James Baldwin

The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

Maajid Nawaz

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

Margaret Sanger

How history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.

Arundhati Roy

Kids don't always stop to judge or analyze a new experience unless the adults around them react strongly. Otherwise, they just take in the experience and move on to the next one.

Martin Sheen

Last summer we had eight people in the [Christian] congregation who danced four different sun dances. Of course the missionaries have said all along that those ceremonies are pagan and we can't do that. Our people insist that they are free in the gospel, free in Christ Jesus, to participate in Indian religious forms and ceremonies. - George Tinker

Jim Wallis (Author)

Allow sunshine and light into your rooms and life!

Bryant McGill

Live with grace and dignity. It's a middle finger to the darkness

Jamie Tworkowski

Good things come to us just when we need them the most, like an angel throwing us a life-preserver before we go under the waters of despair.

Bryant McGill

We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.

Brian D. McLaren

It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.

Mahatma Gandhi

The myth of self-sufficiency demands optimism without end, downplays life’s challenges, and shames us when, inevitably, we fall short.

Ashton Applewhite

Once you choose to love yourself then everything else will be perfect.

Bryant McGill

Quit aspiring and dreaming and start being.

Bryant McGill

When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

Nelson Mandela

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.

Julian Assange

Do not worry in the least about yourself, leave all worry to God,' - this appears to be the commandment in all religions. This need not frighten anyone. He who devotes himself to service with a clear conscience, will day by day grasp the necessity for it in greater measure, and will continually grow richer in faith. The path of service can hardly be trodden by one who is not prepared to renounce self-interest, and to recognize the conditions of his birth. Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make not only for our own happiness but that of the world at large.

Mahatma Gandhi

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

Gloria Steinem

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

ALCOHOL HAS NO BIOLOGICAL CONNECTION TO ABUSE OR VIOLENCEAlcohol does not directly make people belligerent, aggressive, or violent. There is evidence that certain chemicals can cause violent behavior — anabolic steroids, for example, or crack cocaine — but alcohol is not among them. In the human body, alcohol is actually a depressant, a substance that rarely causes aggression. Marijuana similarly has no biological action connected to abusiveness.

Lundy Bancroft

The further you are challenged and threatened, the more your warrior heart will emerge.

Bryant McGill

Accept that you can and will do what you must do, to take good care of yourself.

Bryant McGill

...a woman smart and persistent enough that even a PhD in psychology hasn't clouded her insight into how people think and act.

Derrick Jensen

Self-governance does not mean no one is responsible. It means everyone is.

Heather Marsh

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

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.

Anna Louise Strong

Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.

Gloria Steinem

Success, just like poverty, is a state of mind.

Bryant McGill

In today's world simple kindness is a revolutionary act.

Bryant McGill

When the dark clouds of doubt, anger or worry begin to move upon you, steady yourself in the knowledge that in time, the storm will pass.

Bryant McGill

Nature tops the list of potent tranquilizers and stress reducers. The mere sound of moving water has been shown to lower blood pressure.

Patch Adams

I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

James Baldwin

In my experience there are billions of dollars available for pieces of shit. As soon as the material distinguishes itself by something interesting, financing becomes a problem.

Rutger Hauer

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

Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.

Maya Angelou

Your power and brilliance is the the most awesome force life could muster.

Bryant McGill

Familialism consists of magically denying social reality, and avoiding all connections with the actual flux.

Félix Guattari

The truth only comes if you are willing to face some really unpleasant things about yourself.

Bryant McGill

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Muriel Rukeyser

In some counties, there is an actual named crime of ritual abuse and there too, there have been convictions.

Laurie Matthew

Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.

Starhawk

Who controls the words controls your thoughts.

Heather Marsh

No marketplace, free or otherwise, is good when it fails to consider the basic human state of needs at every stage of life.

Bryant McGill

There is no scientific answer for success. You can't define it. You've simply got to live it and do it.

Anita Roddick

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

Audre Lorde

All identification is for control and ownership.

Bryant McGill

In my right and sober mind, it was time to go into heavy battle and conquer the mind monsters that still held me captive. I had passed many tests but now it was time to step up and fight the final battle: getting past my past. “You can’t have a positive life with a negative mind,

Shelley Lubben

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

Helen Keller

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon.

DaShanne Stokes

And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet.

Russell Brand

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