Quotes by Activists - Page 12

Bryant McGill

I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.

James Baldwin

Is not prayer the intensely personal struggle within each disciple, and among us collectively, to resist the despair and distractions that cause us to practice unbelief, to abandon or avoid the way of Jesus?

Ched Myers

Unleash your mighty words, and with them, recreate a new and more beautiful world for all.

Bryant McGill

Day after day, the globalization of terrorism becomes more evident. This is the one of the biggest challenges we are facing. We must stand with the innocent people around the world who are suffering or have lost their loved ones as a result of terrorism.

Widad Akreyi

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken made verbal and shared even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

Audre Lorde

Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment – you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth.Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, ‘I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.

Russell Brand

Change will never happen if you lack the ability and courage to see yourself for who you really are.

Bryant McGill

But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.

Rebecca Solnit

All the things that are worth doing, take time.

Mos Def

Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.

Nelson Mandela

God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed.

Simone Weil

The struggle is beautiful.

Bryant McGill

The highway of human possibility extends on forever into unknown territories, which have not yet been imagined.

Bryant McGill

I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)

Gloria Steinem

The act of true giving is indistinguishable from receiving.

Bryant McGill

In fact they were looking for weapons eager to find something they could justify the millions of dollars and massive deployment of personnel, the collection of stun-guns, tear-gas guns, pepper-spray guns, M16’s, horses, clubs, and armored personnel carriers with which they intended to protect the city from our hordes of puppet carriers and potentially illegal gardeners

Starhawk

I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.

Elie Wiesel

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Helen Keller

Troubles cured you salty as a country ham smoky to the taste thick-skinned and tender inside.

Marge Piercy

It is a simple tale, but its message is an enduring one: virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know.

Nelson Mandela

Because it is so hard, some people wait until they are in their thirties, forties, fifties, or even older before breaking their silence.

Erin Merryn

How can we expect fate to let a righteous cause prevail when there is hardly anyone who will give himself up undividedly to a righteous cause?

Sophie Scholl

Today I am 65 years old. I still look good. I appreciate and enjoy my age. A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take advantage of it. You still bring to bear all your prior experience, but you are riding on another level. It's completely liberating.

Nikki Giovanni

I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Be not discouraged black women of the world, but push forward, regardless of the lack of appreciation shown you.

Amy Jacques-Garvey

Thank you for this precious day,These gifts you give to me,My heart so full of love for you,Sings praise for all I see,Oh, sing, for every mother's love,For every childhood tear,Oh, sing, for all the stars above,The peace beyond all fear

John Denver

We must share! Sharing IS caring. Share everything: every idea, every resource, every story, every gift, every worry and every burden. Share yourself.

Bryant McGill

America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.

Tom Morello

When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep

Maya Angelou

In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.

James Baldwin

It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves...To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save.

Simone Weil

Ronald Reagan goes around saying that Nicaragua is communist and that communism is a threat to Central America. Why doesn't he say that he's a big capitalist, and that capitalism has made a great mess of Central America? Why doesn't he talk about what capitalism has done? We don't know what communism is, but we sure know what capitalism has done for us!

Elvia Alvarado

By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul.

Theodore Bikel

They say the world has always struggled with injustice and always will. But change is more possible than ever before.

Bryant McGill

The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.

Naomi Klein

You can flip a coin to change its face, but it remains the same coin.

DaShanne Stokes

Each day is an opportunity to build the defenses of peace in the minds of people.

Widad Akreyi

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

Jane Jacobs

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

Helen Keller

If you want more opportunities you have to become an opportunity for others. As you advance yourself your opportunities advance too.

Bryant McGill

When one learns to focus energy through surrender and sensitivity, they become free, and can access the expansiveness of endless possibility.

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

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Live in the present, or die in your past; it's your choice.

Bryant McGill

I was lonely, desperate, and angry. At that moment, I truly understood what it meant to be a Saudi woman. It meant being confronted with every possible kind ofobstacle and discrimination. It meant being told that if you want to race with men, you’d have to do it with your hands and legs cut off. I started to wish I had been born somewhere—anywhere—else.

Manal Al-Sharif

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t.

Rebecca Solnit

This life is like a roller-coaster; once you are strapped-in and the ride has started, you aren't getting off.

Bryant McGill

We are not a voice for the voiceless. The truth is that there is a lot of noise out there drowning out quiet voices, and many people have stopped listening to the cries of their neighbors. Lots of folks have put their hands over their ears to drown out the suffering. Institutions have distanced themselves from the disturbing cries..It is a beautiful thing when folks in poverty are no longer just a missions project but become genuine friends and family with whom we laugh, cry, dream, and struggle. One of the verses I have grown to love is the one where Jesus is preparing to leave the disciples and says, "I no longer call you servants.... Instead, I have called you friends" (John 15:15). Servanthood is a fine place to begin, but gradually we move toward mutual love, genuine relationships. Someday, perhaps we can even say those words that Ruth said to Naomi after years of partnership: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried" (Ruth 1:16-17).

Shane Claiborne

If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it.

Betty Friedan

There is no greater intelligence than kindness and empathy.

Bryant McGill

I think we should look forward to death more than we do. Of course everybody hates to go to bed or miss anything but dying is really the only chance we'll get to rest.

Florynce Kennedy

I am a WomanPhenomenally.Phenomenal Woman,that's me.

Maya Angelou

We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.

Naomi Wolf

I can go on the road - and I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued int he presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.

Gloria Steinem

As free as you allow others to be, such freedom you create for yourself.

Bryant McGill

All the sugar was in the bottom of the cup.

Julia Ward Howe

Life has ... taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors. She taught me to seek sustenance from the endeavor itself but to leave the result to God.

Alan Paton

The potential of your life experience shrinks or expands according to your ability to love.

Bryant McGill

Gender is like a Rubik’s Cube with one hundred squares per side, and every time you twist it to take a look at another angle, you make it that much harder a puzzle to solve.

Sam Killermann

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