Quotes by Activists - Page 10

When I look at people talking about intersectionality, what I see is the human being magnifying a biological attribute, and then putting them aside, putting them in a corner as victims of oppression....I most certainly don't see myself as a victim.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lies are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men and women are prosecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must--at that moment--become the center of the universe.
Elie Wiesel
No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
Audre Lorde
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
Audre Lorde
People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.
Assata Shakur
When i ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, i can feel the Spirit whisper to me, ‘you tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.
Shane Claiborne
They say the world has always struggled with injustice and always will. But change is more possible than ever before.
Bryant McGill
My savage indignation toward injustice is proportionate to my profoundly reverent connection with beauty.
Bryant McGill
It is time for the international community to work for the creation of an independent Kurdistan as they did once for the Jews after the Holocaust. The current war against ISIS, which is perceived by many as World War Three, can be compared to World War Two. After horrible wars, great changes can be brought about for those who have suffered extreme injustice.
Widad Akreyi
I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your mother.
Maya Angelou
This is the role of the mother. And in that visit I really saw clearly, for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and also cuddles... but because in an interesting and and maybe an eerie and other worldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known.
Maya Angelou
S/M flies in the face of every attempt the state makes to appropriate our bodies, our labor, our time, and our imaginations.…the state is deeply offended by any group of people who say, 'My body doesn't belong to you, it belongs to me, so fuck off'…
Patrick Califia-Rice
In my experience there are billions of dollars available for pieces of shit. As soon as the material distinguishes itself by something interesting, financing becomes a problem.
Rutger Hauer
I am & have been for years a confirmed anti-vaccinationist. Anti-vaccination has no backing from the orthodox medical opinion. A medical man who expresses himself against vaccination loses caste. Tremendous pecuniary interests too have grown around vaccination.
Mahatma Gandhi
I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love?
Susie Bright
She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Daddy maybe loved me more than he loves her. This isn't true, and she knows that now--people love different people in different ways--but it must have seemed that way to her when we were little. I look as though I just can't make it, she looks like can't nothing stop her. If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don't see what they see, this can be very painful. I think that's why Sis was always in front of that damn mirror all the time, when we were kids. She was saying, 'I don't care. I got me.' Of course, this only made her come on stronger than ever, which was the last effect she desired: but that's the way we are and that's how we can sometimes get so fucked up. Anyway, she's past all that. She knows who she is, or, at least, she knows who she damn well isn't.
James Baldwin
I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father's ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.
Gloria Steinem
I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life.
Maya Angelou
Camille Paglia is: 'the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters.
Naomi Wolf
If I want my people to be free, Americans have to be free.
Russell Means
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Maya Angelou
They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.
Mahatma Gandhi
One who walks in love sees the world through the envelope of their mission.
Bryant McGill
I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive
Barbara Deming
As free as you allow others to be, such freedom you create for yourself.
Bryant McGill
Peace adores above everything free discussion and expression without intimidation.
Bryant McGill
If I die this instant will you be more content with the morning news? Will your coffee taste better? I am not your fate. I am not your government…I am not your mother, not your father or your nightmare or your health. I am not a fence, not a wall. I am not the law or actuarial tables of your insurance broker. I am a woman with my guts loose in my hands, howling and it’s not because I committed hari-kiri. I suggest either you cook me or sew me back up. I suggest you walk into my pain as into the breaking waves of an ocean of blood, and either we will climb out together and walk away.
Marge Piercy
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.
James Baldwin
We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.
James Baldwin
My mom called Grandma today and told her we would no longer be attending family parties. My mom told her we have had enough of being blamed for something Brian did and everyone brushing it off like it was no big deal.
Erin Merryn
The flow of spiritual connectedness and oneness with life will dwell in you if your heart and mind is open and innocent.
Bryant McGill
You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.
Audre Lorde
Any aggressive lust lacks balance and is unwholesome and obstructive.
Bryant McGill
There is a law of opposition apparent in all life which guarantees balance and fullness.
Bryant McGill
Balance and fullness exists in the polarity of all things.
Bryant McGill
The Judeo-Christian heritage has left us with the view of a universe composed of warring opposites, which are valued as either good or evil. They cannot coexist. A valuable insight of Witchcraft, shared by many earth-based religions, is that polarities are in balance, not at war.
Starhawk
I understand that for beginners it isn't that easy to sit down, close your eyes, and settle into stillness. Your thoughts have gotten used to making SO MUCH NOISE! They have enjoyed too much influence over you to simply fade the first time you try.
Russell Simmons
After my first experience via yoga, I became incredibly focused on experiencing that sense of stillness again. The stillness that reminded me that I could be a better person, a better friend, a better citizen of the world, as well as a better businessman.
Russell Simmons
The beautiful thing about meditation is that it allows you to access that cool guy or girl inside of you that's waiting to come out. You'll be able to access the part of you that people like to be around. The part of you that feels upbeat about things. That feels like you're moving toward your goals without frustration and anxiety. That feels ecstatic to be alive! The more I meditate, the more I have these moments.
Russell Simmons
Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to "handsome" as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator's attention.
Lierre Keith
Rape and sexual assault ... should be understood not just as a form of forced sex, they should also be understood as as a form of injury to the brain and body, and even as a variant of castration.
Naomi Wolf
My goal in going public was not to put my extended family to shame, or to get back at Brian for abusing my sister and me; rather, my mission was to give a face and voice to an epidemic that society stays hushed about.
Erin Merryn
She was so upset about a blog that maybe a total of six people read yet had no compassion for her granddaughters who had suffered the physical and emotional pains of sexual abuse and whose lives were changed forever. The two cannot even be compared, yet when someone is in denial about what happened, they cannot perceive what is true. It seemed too hard for her to let her mind go there and believe her grandson could do such terrible things.
Erin Merryn
Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition.
Pyotr Kropotkin
A complex world of intrigues and power play among couples hascombined to deny young people the love and attention they trulydeserve, more and more teenagers are leaving home to peer up withbad influence which eventually lands them in jail for the lucky onesand six feet under for the not so lucky.
Oche Otorkpa
I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption.
Mahatma Gandhi
Despite the mountain of gold that has been built downtown, Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight that made the early 1990s its worth crisis period since the early Depression.
Mike Davis
They may have forgotten how badly they treated you, or they may pretend that they have forgotten. But watch: They will come back to you.
Maya Angelou
Trust your brain to suggest a solution, then have the courage to follow through.
Maya Angelou
I want you to write down your blessings.
Maya Angelou
In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.
Gloria Steinem
Shelley, you’re just like that oyster.” God confronted me on the deeper areas of my life that I wouldn’t let Him open up and heal. When Garrett saw me walk off alone over the sandy hills, he knew God was leading me to a healing moment. Standing on the edge of the salty waters of Puget Sound, I allowed God to reach into the darkest places in my heart and expose the ugly lies I believed about myself. Huge salty tears pouring out like waves, God assured me He threw my sins out as far as the east is from the west. The tremendous shame and guilt I carried for so many years was being literally washed away into the Pacific Ocean. I was no longer a broken child of sexual abuse but a cherished Champion daughter of the Most High God.
Shelley Lubben
The moment we confront our fears we are declaring that we are contenders for life, and for love.
Bryant McGill
From time to time, in the moments when you need it most, God will speak to you to remind you of your beauty.
Bryant McGill
Witness each moment in astounded jubilation. Take every holy breath in gratitude. Rejoice in life!
Bryant McGill
Everyone doesn’t need to have the same beliefs, we just need to start believing in everyone.
Sam Killermann
This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.
Gloria Steinem
Distinguish between real needs and artificial wants and control the latter.
Mahatma Gandhi
Become a gift in the lives of others and you will always be well received.
Bryant McGill
When you find real love — protect and preserve the sweetness and intimacy of your gift.
Bryant McGill