Quotes by Activists - Page 18

True revolutionary change begins by first challenging yourself -- not the world. Until you own your story and the complexities of your experience, no matter how much you may strain against it, you will still be enslaved -- if not by your oppressor, by your past.

Sil Lai Abrams

Your unstoppable nature is becoming and blooming — you simply, are. Go easy.

Bryant McGill

Are women human yet? If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York's brothels...? Would our genitals be sliced out to "cleanse" us...? When will women be human? When? ~ Half The Sky

Catherine Mackinnon

Peace IS Prosperity.

Bryant McGill

The need for gain, and advantage over others, is one of the chief driving forces behind all human misery.

Bryant McGill

[B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.

Rebecca Solnit

and when we speak we are afraidour words will not be heardnor welcomedbut when we are silentwe are still afraidSo it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive

Audre Lorde

If you want to be the best, be the best, if you are not the best, pretend you are

Muhhamad Ali

The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.

James Baldwin

Progress and healing involves seeing every person as not so different from ourselves.

Bryant McGill

You can choose better relationships, better jobs, better places to live, better uses of your time and better ways of treating yourself.

Bryant McGill

When you give others a new chance, a new chance is really being given to you.

Bryant McGill

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

Grace Paley

Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches.

Rebecca Solnit

There is dignity after the storm.

Catherine Jane Fisher

Separate yourself from the lies and illusions which are not you.

Bryant McGill

The critics only made me work harder.

Muhammad Ali

Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came.

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

Activists have not been passive. For decades, we have tried every tactic to shift the course of our governments. We have voted, written editorials and manifestos, donated money, held signs, protests in marches, blocked streets, shared links, signed petitions, held workshops, knitted scarves, learn to farm, turned off the television, programmed apps, engaged in direct action, committed vandalism, launched legal challenges against pipelines . . . and occupied the financial districts. All this has been for naught. A new approach to activism and a new kind of protest are desperately needed.

Micah White

Pleasure feels better than pain. Make the pursuit of pleasure your guide.

Sharon Weil

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

Rebecca Solnit

I am aware I sound like a Marxist Victor Meldrew but, guess what, I'm over 50 and I don't give a fuck.

Mark Thomas

Zen movement is a meditative practice.

Bryant McGill

Economist Marvin Harris described women as a "literate and docile" labor pool, and "therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries." The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.

Naomi Wolf

...I believe in a God of scandalous grace. I have pledged allegiance to a King who loved evildoers so much he died for them, teaching us that there is something worth dying for but nothing worth killing for.

Shane Claiborne

Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.

Rebecca Solnit

Violent men, and men in authority over violent men, and the broader public that authorises those men, are not yet shamed by the harm of coercive control over women ... Maybe we can rest some hope on the growing activity of men of goodwill calling on each other to change. When that group hits a critical mass, the majority of men will be more likely to want to change.

Lee Lakeman

Any story dealing, however seriously, with homosexual love is taken to be a story about homosexuality while stories dealing with heterosexual love are seen as stories about the individual people they portray. This is as much a problem today for American filmmakers who cannot conceive of the presence of gay characters in a film unless the specific subject of the film is homosexuality. Lesbians and gay men are thereby classified as purely sexual creatures, people defined solely by their sexual urges.

Vito Russo

I'm tired of playing worn-out depressing ladies in frayed bathrobes. I'm going to get a new hairdo and look terrific and go back to school and even if nobody notices I'm going to be the most self-fulfilled lady on the block.

Joanne Woodward

Lies sound like facts to those who've been conditioned to mis-recognize the truth.

DaShanne Stokes

When all the public eye sees are headscarves instead of individual stories, our community is collectively tokenized. It creates the perception that opportunity is limited and only a rare few of us can make it. Whenever that happens to an already marginalized community, it pits its own members in a competition against one another instead of against the restrictive frameworks that put us in that position in the first place. The first hijabi whatever won't eliminate Islamophobia just as the first black president hasn't eliminated racism, though both are signifiers of some type of progress — symbols of ascending beyond adversity.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

Dreams do come true for those who dare to believe in themselves.

Bryant McGill

I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.

Rachel Corrie

The nature of Nature is change.

Sharon Weil

... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.

Rebecca Solnit

I become more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of Hussein, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers and his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.

Mahatma Gandhi

Once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us like.

Alice Walker

Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.

Naomi Wolf

I am pleased God made my skin black. I only wish He had to made it thicker.

Curt Flood

You cannot avoid what you fear because what you fear is inside of you.

Bryant McGill

If you have a poverty of heart then you are the poorest among the poor.

Bryant McGill

It's like suddenly in the Middle Ages, people figured men should be in charge of women's bodies since they were in charge of pretty much everything else

Inga Muscio

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.

Mahatma Gandhi

To live a wonderful life create more, buy less, hug more, scold less, give more, take less, forgive more, worry less and be grateful everyday for life.

Bryant McGill

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

Gloria Steinem

Your suffering is there to inspect you and perfect you. We are made complete by our pain.

Bryant McGill

And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.

Maya Angelou

One should not think of embracing another religion before one had fully understand his own.

Mahatma Gandhi

This document [the Reconstruction and Development Programme] was translated into a simpler manifesto called 'A Better Life for All', which in turn became the ANC's campaign slogan.

Nelson Mandela

Your body will heal itself, through gentle and peaceful cooperation with the inherent wisdom and intelligence within.

Bryant McGill

Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.

Barbara Ehrenreich

When we choose to engage reality as the best each moment can be, we are shaping more positive experiences for others.

Bryant McGill

You will always receive what you are equal to.

Bryant McGill

National pride is the culmination of a lifetime public relations campaign of psychological mind-control techniques.

Bryant McGill

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

Marian Wright Edelman

The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that 'justice is what love looks like in public.' I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.

Naomi Klein

Jesus revealed a face of God that bothered society profoundly! (Carlos Mesters, p. 122)

Mev Puleo

Stop being so greedy, and so selfish. Realize that there is more to the world than your big houses and fancy stores. People are starving and you worry about oil for your cars. Babies are dying of thirst and you search the fashion pages for the latest styles. Nations like ours are drowing in poverty, but your people don't even hear our cries for help. You shut your ears to the voices of those who try to tell you these things. You label them radicals or Communists. You must open your hearts to the poor and downtrodden, instead of driving them further into poverty and servitude. There's not much time left. If you don't change, you're doomed.

John Perkins

People can only have power over you if you are seeking to have power over others.

Bryant McGill

Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.

Helen Keller

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