Quotes by Activists - Page 17

A mn ages hs enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: I hate him not because he's my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.

Elie Wiesel

IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.

Lundy Bancroft

Literature is my utopia.

Helen Keller

Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless.'-archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 2001

Naomi Klein

A nation lives forever through its concepts, honour, and culture. It is for these reasons that the rulers of nations must judge and act not only on the basis of physical and material interests of the nation but on the basis of the nation's historical honour, of the nation's eternal interests. Thus: not bread at all costs, but honour at all costs.

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

What is so sweet as to awake from a troubled dream and behold a beloved face smiling upon you? I love to believe that such shall be our awakening from earth to heaven. My faith never wavers that each dear friend I have “lost” is a new link between this world and the happier land beyond the morn. My soul is for the moment bowed down with grief when I cease to feel the touch of their hands or hear a tender word from them; but the light of faith never fades from the sky, and I take heart again, glad they are free. I cannot understand why anyone should fear death…Suppose there are a million chances against that one that my loved ones who have gone on are alive. What of it? I will take that one chance and risk mistake, rather than let any doubts sadden their souls, and find out afterward. Since there is that one chance of immortality, I will endeavor not to cast a shadow on the joy of the departed…Certainly it is one of our sweetest experiences that when we are touched by some noble affection or pure joy, we remember the dead most tenderly, and feel more powerfully drawn to them.

Helen Keller

I don't believe vegans (or vegetarians) who still get their (packaged, preservative/chemical-ridden) food from industrial food systems have any righteous ground to stand on, nor do I think a deep look at the sentient life of plants or the true environmental impact of agriculture permits them any comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in this world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether running on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you've never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord.

Brian Awehali

Freedom is the most sophisticated form of control. The best lies use the truth.

Bryant McGill

I’m much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don’t work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it.

Myles Horton

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

Gloria Steinem

Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.

Maya Angelou

Ladies, stress shows on your face. Happiness is the true beauty we

Susan Sarandon

Fear is a prison where you are the jailer. Free yourself!

Bryant McGill

Before you echo 'Amen' in your home or place of worship, think and remember...a child is listening.

Mary Griffith

Facts are threatening to those invested in fraud.

DaShanne Stokes

Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high?

Andrea Dworkin

All it takes is rumor...The danger itself is irrelevant. It's the perception of danger we're selling.

Sharon Weil

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

Gloria Steinem

The dreamer's untamed eye sees beyond the illusions to the heart of what is real.

Bryant McGill

A slut isn’t a person, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she’s done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it’s a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and ‘conquests’ like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less.

Laura Bates

Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?

Rebecca Solnit

Once you let the truth loose it is like setting a fire that you can't stop.

Bryant McGill

Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway.

Myles Horton

Education about gender and peace is important. Educational strategies to promote peace must consider all relations of dominance.

Widad Akreyi

I started to see the bigger picture of things: Islam was not relegated to the tiny, sometimes frustrating and seemingly arbitrary details of practice, but rather entered the larger picture of spirituality and worship that contextualized my womanhood. In order to be able to derive these logical conclusions about my religion, I had to go back to the basics and understand the very fundamental principles upon which it was founded: justice, social equality, racial equality, financial equality, and, possibly most important of all, gender equality. Thus began my lifelong love affair with Islamic feminism.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

Naomi Wolf

The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. Its a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers . . . The borders are open, folks! Come on in.

Arundhati Roy

We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration and then 350 million under strong international pressure)...but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish

Rebecca Solnit

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

In reverent pauses, when we slow down and think about the gift of life, we may briefly touch humility.

Bryant McGill

When it comes to peace, we need to facilitate peace-makers' personal engagement and their genuine desire to bridge the gap between advocacy knowledge and skills necessary to differentiate between theory and practice in the field of conflict management.

Widad Akreyi

Start the daily practice of joyful living.

Bryant McGill

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

James Baldwin

It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.

Helen Keller

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

From Shore To ShoreOur Message of Love & PeaceTo ALL OUR Kids

Widad Akreyi

Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.

Simone Weil

Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture’s intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women’s rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride.

James Baldwin

Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

James Baldwin

This is a book about getting naked—not physically, but spiritually. It’s about stripping away the symbols and status of public religion—the Sunday-dress version people often call “organized religion.” And it’s about attending to the well-being of the soul clothed only in naked human skin.

Brian D. McLaren

I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.

Dan Barker

I believed I was too sensitive and weak. To “prove” I wasn’t a victim anymore, I moved closer to painful experiences rather than away from them. Remaining in harm’s way and exposing myself to more pain kept me in the victim role rather than moving me out of it.

Christina Enevoldsen

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Nelson Mandela

We hold further that Communism is not only desirable, but that existing societies, founded on Individualism, are inevitably impelled in the direction of Communism. The development of Individualism during the last three centuries is explained by the efforts of the individual to protect himself from the tyranny of Capital and of the State. For a time he imagined, and those who expressed his thought for him declared, that he could free himself entirely from the State and from society. "By means of money," he said, "I can buy all that I need." But the individual was on a wrong tack, and modern history has taught him to recognize that, without the help of all, he can do nothing, although his strong-boxes are full of gold.

Pyotr Kropotkin

In modern politics, even the leader of the free world needs help from the sultan of Facebookistan.

Rebecca MacKinnon

Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.

Andrea Gibson

Find a voice in a whisper.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Society has a herd psychology, so until we have more good shepherds we are lost.

Bryant McGill

What is a Communist? One who hath yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings.

Ebenezer Elliott

There is an enlightened way to flow with, in, and through conflict.

Bryant McGill

For me, those weeks in Boston, with Wilma, became a lesson in her ability to be “of good mind,” in her phrase, which also meant a people’s ability to survive.

Gloria Steinem

He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.

Simone Weil

...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.

James Baldwin

Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.This means the when you go to sleep you close your eyes and you are and look like you are dead but then when you wake up it looks like you are reborn because you are up and ready.

Mahatma Gandhi

A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.

Rebecca Solnit

The life you want is a manifestation of self-realization.

Bryant McGill

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

Maya Angelou

Pain is like a healing emotional fever.

Bryant McGill

The primary reason more explicit material is now being published is twofold: there's money in the sale of sensational material, and few are trying to stop those who want to make this money, that is, unscrupulous publishers.

Linda Harvey

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