Quotes by Activists - Page 15

To be successful you have to be dumb enough to think you can change the world and smart enough to know how.
Clint Borgen
Coexistence and personal peace are at the heart of global peace and harmony.
Widad Akreyi
Praise first the mighty blessing of yourself!
Bryant McGill
Recognize that you are enough, and that all external gifts are simply extra blessings.
Bryant McGill
You will be blessed the moment you realize you already are.
Bryant McGill
It is staggering how completely, fully and fairly life supports you if your negativity will allow the blessings to arrive.
Bryant McGill
When you wish someone joy, you wish them peace, love, prosperity, happiness... all the good things.
Maya Angelou
I try to live my life every day in the present, and try not to turn a blind eye to injustice and
Susan Sarandon
From this Legionary school a new man will have to emerge, a man with heroic qualities; a giant of our history to do battle and win over all the enemies of our Fatherland, his battle and victory having to extend even beyond the material world into the realm of invisible enemies, the powers of evil. Everything that our mind can imagine as more beautiful spiritually; everything the proudest that our race can produce, greater, more just, more powerful, wiser, purer, more diligent and more heroic, this is what the Legionary school must give us! A man in whom all the possibilities of human grandeur that are implanted by God in the blood of our people be developed to the maximum. This hero, the product of Legionary education, will also know how to elaborate programs; will also know how to solve the Jewish problem; will also know how to organize the state well; will also know how to convince other Romanians; and if not, he will know how to win, for that is why he is a hero. This hero, this Legionary of bravery, labour, and justice, with the powers God implanted in his soul, will lead our Fatherland on the road of its glory.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
Nationalism is a form of cultural self-centeredness, and as a collective thought-form, can only exist because the dominant in-group is itself comprised of self-centered and narcissistic individuals.
Bryant McGill
Giving yourself is the ultimate revolution.
Bryant McGill
This is our sacred land, Bharat, a land whose glories are sung by theGods, a land visualized by Mahayogi Aurobindo as the living manifestationof the Divine Mother of the universe, the Jaganmaataa, the Aadishakti,the Mahaamaayaa, the Mahaadurgaa, Who has assumed concrete form toenable us to see Her and worship Her,...a land worshipped by all our seers andsages as Maatrubhoomi, Dharmabhoomi, Karmabhoomi and Punybhoomi, averitable Devabhoomi and Mokshabhoomi" -
Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar
A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.
Giuseppe Mazzini
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
James Baldwin
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Some people know of no other way to interface with others except through their created chaos.
Bryant McGill
At the fringe edge of advancement it's a war of anarchy and chaos.
Bryant McGill
When you have so little, just the smallest thing can make you happy
Yeonmi Park
True happiness lies in being compassionate and appreciating the world and our circumstances, rather than being coldhearted and greedy. We often realize too late that our favorite moments are those spent simply with the people we love. In seeing the miracles that unfold around us every day. Eventually we all come to understand that our happiness is derived from being present in the moment. Why wait until the end of your life to discover this Truth?
Russell Simmons
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Alice Walker
Maybe you receive pain selfishly — thinking only of yourself. The cycle of pain wounds every participant.
Bryant McGill
The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places. (p 57)
Bryant McGill
Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given.
Marian Wright Edelman
Selfishness is blind.
Mahatma Gandhi
If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.
Geena Davis
Want is always hungry and searching whereas contentment is steady, calm and receiving.
Bryant McGill
Excessive want is a form of desperation and a declaration of lack.
Bryant McGill
Want is small and will make you small. Want is needy and will make you needy.
Bryant McGill
Life wants you to touch, taste and see the grandeur of the world's unfathomable variety.
Bryant McGill
Life wants you to know that people are more important than things.
Bryant McGill
Life wants you to know yourself, be yourself and love yourself.
Bryant McGill
If you want more from life — start by counting your blessings instead of counting your losses, deficits and wants.
Bryant McGill
Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.
Maya Angelou
The fear of abandonment forced me to comply as a child, but I’m not forced to comply anymore. The key people in my life did reject me for telling the truth about my abuse, but I’m not alone. Even if the consequence for telling the truth is rejection from everyone I know, that’s not the same death threat that it was when I was a child. I’m a self-sufficient adult and abandonment no longer means the end of my life.
Christina Enevoldsen
There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.
Bryant McGill
The necessity, then, of those “lesser breeds without the law”—those wogs, barbarians, niggers—is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply “spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again,” leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest.
James Baldwin
The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.
Derrick Jensen
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
Then one woman looked directly at her husband. "Is our place gone?" "I'm afraid so, girl," he said. "There isn't much left up there. But we're alive. We're all lucky to be alive. We'd have been dead if we'd stayed up above." "Oh, what a mercy we didn't!" she exclaimed. "How lucky we are!" Incredible though it sounds, within a few moments, a whole lot of people were congratulating each other on their extraordinary good fortune in only having lost all their worldy posessions.
Ida Cook
You can not change the past but you can change the future.
Immortal Technique
Protesting is never a disturbance of the peace. Corruption, injustice, war and intimidation are disturbances of the peace.
Bryant McGill
I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.
Laura Bates
[T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, "The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism.
Rebecca Solnit
Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?
Pyotr Kropotkin
What had been a region of model farming became almost a desert, for more than half the population was exiled or sent to concentration camps. The young people left the villages, the boys to go to the factories if they could get jobs, or to become vagabonds if they couldn’t.***An echo of the tragic fate of Russia’s German Protestant population reached the world when the Mennonites flocked to Moscow and sought permission to leave the country. Some of these Germans had tried to obey the government and had formed collective farms, only to have them liquidated as Kulak collectives. Being first-class farmers, they had committed the crime of making even a Kolkhoz productive and prosperous.Others had quite simply been expropriated from their individual holdings. All were in despair. Few were allowed to leave Russia. They were sent to Siberia to die, or herded into slave labor concentration camps. The crime of being good farmers was unforgivable, and they must suffer for this sin.***Cheat or be cheated, bully or be bullied, was the law of life. Only the German minority with their strong religious and moral sense—the individual morality of the Protestant as opposed to the mass subservience demanded by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Soviet Government—retained their culture and even some courage under Stalin’s Terror.
Freda Utley
Why is it that we who have enjoyed the human free­doms which our forefathers fought so hard to win and to bequeath to us, do not, with the example of Russia before us, realize the horrors of life without freedom? Why is it that we cannot understand that there is no such thing as embracing Communism as an experiment? It is a one-way street, ending in a cul de sac of secret police terror, firing squads for the intellectuals and leaders and concentration camps and slave labor for the masses. There is no turning back; there is no escape.
Freda Utley
Perhaps the breaking of the human spirit into submissive, thoughtless robots is the most terrible feature of Stalin’s Russia. Humanity is bowed down. Every one cringes before his superiors, and those who abase themselves seek outlets in bullying and terrifying the unfortunates beneath them. Integrity, courage and charity disappear in the stifling atmosphere of cant, falsehood and terror.
Freda Utley
The very act of writing then, conjuring/coming to 'see', what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true. The body - that site which houses the intuitive, the unspoken, the viscera of our being - this is the revolutionary promise of "theory in the flesh
Cherríe L. Moraga
The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in.
Pete Seeger
Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively...
Masha Gessen
The Holy Fool is always considered a dummy by the smart, hip people who really know the score. There’s a mysterious blight on the land, nothing will grow and no one knows how to break the spell. The Holy Fool sets out to find the cause, right the wrong, save the people. He’s told he can’t do it, that he’s too dumb, too weak, too something, hearing from all quarters, “That’s not how we do things here," and “You just don’t understand." But he goes ahead anyway.
Ann Medlock
Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and all. And once you do, you will feel so much better
Harvey Milk
Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.
Rebecca Solnit
The day is ours, and what the day has shown.
Helen Keller
There isn't a man on earth who doesn't at times pronounce an opinion on good and evil, even if it be only to find fault with somebody else.
Simone Weil
Divine judgment is intended not to destroy but to awaken people to the devastating truth about their lives.
Walter Wink
Fun is not an activity, it is a state of mind.
Bryant McGill
I thought she would be fun to have fun with.
James Baldwin
That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with.
James Baldwin
Witchcraft is fun. It offers us a chance to play, to act silly, to let the inner child come out. Out of foolishness and play, creativity is born.
Starhawk