Quotes by Activists - Page 14

We are all born and someday we’ll all die. Most likely to some degree alone.What if our aloneness isn’t a tragedy? What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure – to experience the world as a dynamic presence – as a changeable, interactive thing?If I lived in Bosnia or Rwanda or who knows where else, needless death wouldn’t be a distant symbol to me, it wouldn’t be a metaphor, it would be a reality.And I have no right to this metaphor. But I use it to console myself. To give a fraction of meaning to something enormous and needless.This realization. This realization that I will live my life in this world where I have privileges.I can’t cool boiling waters in Russia. I can’t be Picasso. I can’t be Jesus. I can’t save the planet single-handedly.I can wash dishes.

Rachel Corrie

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

Rebecca Solnit

I came to the conclusion long ago that all religions were true and that also that all had some error in them, and while I hold by my own religion, I should hold other religions as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we were Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu; but our innermost prayer should be that a Hindu should become a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, and a Christian a better Christian.

Mahatma Gandhi

Excellence in health means devoting your life to ending poverty.

Patch Adams

Bigotry hurts the economy, so the next time you want to blame minorities for your problems, first take a look in the mirror.

DaShanne Stokes

Revolution starts in the mind. Question Everything!

Bryant McGill

Anyone who hates anyone, only hates themselves.

Bryant McGill

You lose nothing when fighting for a cause ... In my mind the losers are those who don't have a cause they care about.

Muhammad Ali

LA VIDA NO ES LA QUE VIVIMOS.LA VIDA ES EL HONOR Y EL RECUERDO.POR ESO MAS VALE MORIRCON EL PUEBLO VIVO,Y NO VIVIRCON EL PUEBLO MUERTO.Life is not as it seems, Life is pride and personal history.Thus it is better that one die and that the people should live,rahter than one live and the people should die.~Lopitos

Oscar Zeta Acosta

No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.

Wendy McElroy

The gift of life is present at every moment — even moments that seem insignificant or unpleasant.

Bryant McGill

If men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.

Florynce Kennedy

Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture.

Tim Wise

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

Muriel Rukeyser

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

Alice Walker

So often parents of abused children feel helpless. When a child falls, and scrapes her knees parents can erase the hurt by kissing it and putting a Band-Aid on it, but not so with the pain of sexual abuse.

Erin Merryn

I interviewed my dad on video in his final weeks. When I asked about his work and finding meaning through helping others, he responded, "I don't think you can be focused on, 'Oh gee, I want to make a difference.' It has to be spontaneous. If it's not...there's some kind of egotistical thing going on. That's a red flag. You hope you impact people on the deepest level you are capable of at the time. Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. You're trying.

Lisa J. Shannon

Unless institutional power reinforces the hurt and prejudice suffered by a group, it is not oppression. By definition, a person of color cannot be racist, or a woman sexist, because they do not have the institutionalized power to act on their prejudices. Also, by definition, all white people are racist, not just because of the personal attitudes that we usually think of as racist, but because of the privilege white skin brings in our society. Whites cannot say they are not racist because they are born into a society that teaches racism and reinforces white privilege every day even before they can be aware of it. Whites can choose, however, to be active antiracists, which means making a commitment to a lifelong process of learning to recognize racism in themselves and in the institutions they are part of and taking steps to stop it.

Linda Stout

How beautiful it is to live in a world with no walls.

Manal Al-Sharif

In November, when our nation remembers her fallen soldiers and honours the lost youth of my generation, the Prime Minister, government leaders and the hollow men of business affix paper poppies to their lapels and afford the dead of war two minutes' silence. Afterwards, they speak golden platitudes about the struggle and the heroism of that time. Yet the words they speak are meaningless because they have surrendered the values my generation built after the horrors of the Second World War.

Harry Leslie Smith

A purpose is more like a positive daily-grind, with gratitude and a smile.

Bryant McGill

The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.

Arundhati Roy

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

Maya Angelou

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.

Jane Jacobs

People often call fighting racism being 'PC' when they don't want to confront their own prejudice

DaShanne Stokes

Adoption isn't just a childhood experience, it's a life-long experience.

DaShanne Stokes

By being beautiful and kind you are given favored status and opportunity in life.

Bryant McGill

But so long as I lived under a system of Government based on force and voluntarily partook of the many facilities and privileges it created for me, I was bound to help that Government to the extent of my ability when it was engaged in a war, unless I non-co-operated with the Government and renounced to the utmost of my capacity the privileges it offered me.

Mahatma Gandhi

Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.

Naomi Wolf

I’m very fond of the concept of choice as the basis for sexual preference. This point of view is unpopular in an era in which every claim for gay rights is bases on pseudoscientific sulking about how we can’t help being queer; we’re just born that way. Thanks, but I don’t want to receive my civil rights as a charity fuck bequeathed on me by my genetic superiors.

Patrick Califia-Rice

Each person is a vast territory of undiscovered mystery as nebulous and uncharted as the deepest oceans and expanses of space.

Bryant McGill

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

Naomi Wolf

I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn't this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and to aim them at those who are already under siege.

Leslie Feinberg

If you risk nothing then you risk everything.

Geena Davis

For years to come the debris of a convulsed world will beset our steps. It will require a purpose stronger than any man and worthy of all men to calm and inspirit us. A sane society whose riches are happy children, men and women, beautiful with peace and creative activity, is not going to be ordained for us. We must make it ourselves.

Helen Keller

We owe our loyalty to each other and to our children's children, not to party politics.

DaShanne Stokes

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

James Baldwin

It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.

Ashton Applewhite

Truth resides in every human heart,and one has to search for it there,and to be guided by truth as one sees it.But no one has a right to coerce othersto act according to his own view of truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?

Arundhati Roy

Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though it's intimate and psychological-resistant to generalization a mystery of the individual soul.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our attitudes and our habits. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world. Only in people who are severely traumatized or who have major mental illnesses is behavior governed by feelings. And only a tiny percentage of abusive men have these kinds of severe psychological problems.

Lundy Bancroft

We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.

James Baldwin

We're half the people we should be half the Congress.

Jeannette Rankin

The biggest liar you will ever meet is yourself. It is amazing the lies we tell ourselves because of fear.

Bryant McGill

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.

Arundhati Roy

The goal is not to answer these questions. The goal is to be present to them with all that we are. In a way we are following the poet Rilke's advice when he counseled the young artist, "be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along into the answer.

Adam Bucko

Do not make the mistake of thinking that you have to agree with people and their beliefs to defend them from injustice.

Bryant McGill

Policy-makers continue to discover that they cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s mindsets

Widad Akreyi

A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.

Billie Jean King

Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.

Arundhati Roy

Every word you speak is a prayer, or meditation of reinforcement which creates permanence.

Bryant McGill

No matter how many toys we amass we leave them behind when we die, just as we leave a broken environment, an economy that only benefits the richest, and a legacy of empowering greed over goodness. It is now time to commit to following a new path.

John Perkins

Politics is theater. It doesn't matter if you win. You make a statement. You say, "I'm here, pay attention to me

Harvey Milk

The concurrence of two elements is necessary for bringing about a revolution; and by revolution I do not mean the street warfare, nor the bloody conflicts of two parties—both being mere incidents dependent upon many circumstances—but the sudden overthrow of institutions which are the outgrowths of centuries past, the sudden uprising of new ideas and new conceptions, and the attempt to reform all political and economical institutions in a radical way—all at the same time. Two separate currents must converge to come to that result: a widely spread economic revolt, tending to change the economical conditions of the masses, and a political revolt, tending to modify the very essence of the political organisation—an economical change, supported by an equally important change of political institutions.

Pyotr Kropotkin

I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility with no history to guide them and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.

Gloria Steinem

It’s hard to hear the gentle whisper of the Spirit amid the noise of Christendom.

Shane Claiborne

One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog shit hotdogs, dog shit ice cream, General Tso's dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn't taste good. Or if you cling too tightly to these stories (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make this example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. Or, for that matter, substitute Big Mac, Whopper, or Coca Cola.

Derrick Jensen

Whether there are innately female leadership styles ... is not really the right question. It is more important to ask why there has been so little attention paid to women leaders over the years as well as why the styles of leading more often exhibited by women are particularly useful at this critical moment in history.

Charlotte Bunch

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