Quotes by Activists

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?
Kate Millett
Geography and mileage mean nothing. Separate is a single word that covers all distances that aren't together.
Rivera Sun
He laughed a lot, but as a boy he had been so self-conscious about being dark-skinned that he went to the fields to get buffalo milk to spread on his face, thinking it would make him lighter. It was only when he met my mother that he became comfortable in his own skin. Being loved by such a beautiful girl gave him confidence.
Malala Yousafzai
I dreamed of going to the top of Mount Elum like Alexander the Great to touch Jupiter and even beyond the valley. But, as I watched my brother running across the roof, flying their kites and skillfully flicking the strings back and forth to cut each other's down, I wondered hoe free a daughter could ever be.
Malala Yousafzai
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.
Barbara Ehrenreich
I'll never know why it was important to him that the couple (he said it later that he'd never seen them before) would take a picture of the whole Mr. Johnson back to Little Rock.He must have been tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame. The high topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them.I understood and felt closer to him at that moment than ever before or since.
Maya Angelou
It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.
James Baldwin
Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.
James Baldwin
He pondered that a little while and then he asked, do Black people have to pay for their doctors, too? Because that's what TV programs had said. I smiled a little at this and told him it's not only Black people who have to pay for doctors and medical care; all people in America have to. Ah, he said. And suppose you don't have the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don't have the money to pay, sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me, as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of medical care. It's things like that that keep me dreaming about Russia long after I've returned.
Audre Lorde
You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds.When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else's dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center.
Alice Walker
The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much. It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.
Simone Weil
The man’s rights and the woman’s rights are the same size. They have the right to have their opinions and desires respected, to have a 50 percent say in decision making, to live free from verbal abuse and physical harm. Their children’s rights are somewhat smaller but substantial nonetheless; children can’t have an equal say in decisions because of their limited knowledge and experience, but they do have the right to live free from abuse and fear, to be treated with respect, and to have their voices heard on all issues that concern them.
Lundy Bancroft
If the system were designed to protect adoptees, why do so many have to fight for their rights?
DaShanne Stokes
The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through the police, carnivorous landlords, and the welfare system.
Junius Williams
While most activists could use a good dose of gentleness, I think most believers could use a good dose of holy anger.
Shane Claiborne
Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production.
Gloria Steinem
But if you sit around thinking what to do and end up not doing anything, why bother even thinking about it? You're better off going out on the town and having a good time. No, we have to think and act. That's what we're doing here, and that's what you have to do.
Elvia Alvarado
Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.
Grace Lee Boggs
The physical threat posed by climate change represents a crisis that is not only material but also profoundly spiritual at its core because it challenges us to think seriously about the future of the human race and what it means to be a human being.
Grace Lee Boggs
Still, it becomes clearer every day that organizing or joining massive protests and demanding new policies fail to sufficiently address the crisis we face. They may demonstrate that we are on the right side politically, but they are not transformative enough. They do not change the cultural images or the symbols that play such a pivotal role in molding us into who we are.
Grace Lee Boggs
We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that's struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many others in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization.
Grace Lee Boggs
Don’t be a witness. Be an activist.
DaShanne Stokes
If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone, or you’re too sick to be angry. You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.
Maya Angelou
Every day I get better at knowing that it is not a choice to be an activist; rather, it is the only way to hold on to the better parts of my human self. It is the only way I can live and laugh without guilt.
Staceyann Chin
Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.
Mahatma Gandhi
You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.
Mahatma Gandhi
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
Stop blaming and start being!
Bryant McGill
When you blame others you are effectively proclaiming that you are only response to stimuli.
Bryant McGill
You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.
Julian Assange
It is more informative how we treat things with no defined legal rights, than how we treat things with legal rights.
Bryant McGill
[W]hen a message is squeezed through a twenty-second news spot, so much can be lost that what is left will fail to move anyone enough to make them turn off the set and actually do something. Meanwhile, the viewers will believe that they have learned everything they need to know on that subject and will be bored the next time they hear it.
Jerry Mander
Love is the perfect safety, or the perfect weapon.
Bryant McGill
Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain's question: Is it safe here?
Naomi Wolf
Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old.Not young.But a viable die-able age.
Arundhati Roy
Let go of everything. That is how you get everything.
Bryant McGill
At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
Maya Angelou
She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright.
Arundhati Roy
She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.
Arundhati Roy
It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong but it will advance its allotted length.
Helen Keller
(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Worse
However confused the scene of our life appears however torn we may be who now do face that scene it can be faced and we can go on to be whole.
Muriel Rukeyser
When you can't remember why you're hurt that's when you're healed. When you have to work real hard to re-create the pain and you can't quite get there that's when you're better.
Jane Fonda
Although the world is full of suffering it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.
Mary Tyler Moore
Alone we can do so little together we can do so much.
Helen Keller
Today whenever women gather together it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building. And if you feel the strain you may be doing some good work.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories for all our differences turn out if we listen well to be our stories also.
Barbara Deming
Men and women are like right and left hands: it doesn't make sense not to use both.
Jeannette Rankin
Exchange is creation.
Muriel Rukeyser
Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy
Neither woman nor man lives by work or love alone.... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
Betty Friedan
What a richly colored strong warm coat is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.
Marge Piercy
Don't be afraid of hard work.
Marian Wright Edelman
The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
Helen Keller
Like plowing housework makes the ground ready for the germination of family life. The kids will not invite a teacher home if beer cans litter the living room. The family isn't likely to have breakfast together if somebody didn't remember to buy eggs milk or muffins. Housework maintains an orderly setting in which family life can flourish.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Gloria Steinem
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
Boys don't make passes at female smart-asses.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored: He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.
Julia Ward Howe