Quotes by Activists - Page 16

What was so painful about Amy’s death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. Don’t pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. It sounds so simple; it actually is simple but it isn’t easy; it requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.
Russell Brand
There is no one way to recover and heal from any trauma. Each survivor chooses their own path or stumbles across it.
Laurie Matthew
Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.
Russell Brand
The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.
Russell Brand
I've realized that everything is about relationships. I've witnessed that ultimately you can't take what you don't give because there is a master bookkeeper out there who keeps accounts balanced. This fundamental link between man, plants, and the earth has been documented since the dawn of civilization.
Vivian Elisabeth Glyck
The critic said, but don't you feel awkward about biting the hand that feeds you? I said no, I enjoy just gnawing it up to the shoulder.
Myles Horton
The only guide which I feel that I can follow is not the fluctuating dicta of those who are victors in the battle for popularity at a given moment, but my own understanding of the American tradition in which I was brought up.
Jane Jacobs
I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull
The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the faint suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup.
Rebecca Solnit
Quitting a job can be like an exorcism where you cast out a demon. The demon is the foreign spirit who occupies you through your occupation.
Bryant McGill
A protect-yourself-first-and-foremost idea has subverted the mission of law-enforcement officers, just as it may have degraded the military's.
Ann Medlock
...the church lives in a regime of ecclesial authoritarian security and the military elites live in a regime of national authoritarian security. These structures produce the same kind of authoritarian people, with a super defensive stance in their strategies and argumentation. This is why they understand each other! (Leonardo Boff, p. 178)
Mev Puleo
At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
Barbara Ehrenreich
It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.
Mahatma Gandhi
Sugar cane reach up to GodAnd every baby cryingShame the blanket of my nightAnd all my days are dying
Maya Angelou
I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.
Barbara Ehrenreich
I lie there for a while in the dusk, then make a decision, little knowing how it will affect every facet of my life and fiber of my being for the rest of my life: I say no to shame.
Alan Cumming
It was a crying shame!
Ru Freeman
Giving is the key to all success in all applications of human life.
Bryant McGill
I learned that you can't truly own anything, that true ownership comes only in the moment of giving.
Mia Farrow
I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields.
Rebecca Solnit
The meaning of life is simply the meaning we give to it.
Bryant McGill
Life wants you to be able to fully receive and give affection and love.
Bryant McGill
When people are treated like a product, they become obsessed with materialism.
Bryant McGill
Materialism is an identity crisis.
Bryant McGill
The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.
Eli Pariser
We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
Maya Angelou
Beyond miracles, what has lasting significance is love. It wasn’t that Jesus healed a leper, but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.
Shane Claiborne
it will be miraculous, very miraculous.
Malika Oufkir
While women have come far in their ability to speak on their own behalf, there are many women who compromise what they want to say and what they actually say. Almost all women experience a dissonance between inner and outer. As a matter of emotional and sometimes physical survival, women have found it necessary to split their speech into two parts. One kind of speech is suppressed, occurring only in safe settings with intimates or within the ultimate safety of a woman's own mind.The second kind of speech is the publicly acceptable type that conforms to social expectations. The injunction to suppress certain feelings or thoughts can be so powerful that a woman may not be aware of it and may honestly believe that publicly acceptable speech is all she has in her. Carol Gilligan's work describes the destructive effects of this splitting of voice, especially in young girls who, as they embark on adolescence, have trouble speaking with clarity and strength. An emphasis on listening cultivates a stronger expression of voice. Listening is a crucial component in Imago Theory, where couples are taught to mirror, or repeat back, each other's thoughts, feelings, and needs as a way of building not only their partner's sense of self, but their own. Our core self becomes stronger when it is mirrored back. Voice that is not mirrored dies. When the process of mirroring is followed by validating and empathizing, a deep listening is done with feeling. All of us need validation -- that who we are, what we think, and how we feel does make sense. And the deepest form of listening is empathy, by which we are able to resonate on a soul level with the feelings and needs of one another.A wise proverb states that "Speech is silver, Silence is gold," reminding us of the forgotten value of silence. Feminist theorist Patrocinio Schweickart chose those words as the title of her article on talking and listening that parallels the inward and outward rhythm of Imago dialogue. She points our attention to the value of quiet as a tool that helps us notice the complex interplay of inner and outer that characterizes any creative process. For something new to happen, we need silence and receptivity as well as action and productivity. While some theorists see speaking as active and listening as passive, Schweickart and Imago Theory both point to the reality that both speaking and listening are active. Listening is a way of meaning-making. Theologian Nelle Morten refers to this dynamic as "hearing each other into speech."Ultimately, the development of authentic voice is a process that involves that involves a flow between speaking and listening. In listening, one becomes attuned to the surroundings so that speech becomes relevant and meaningful. This undulating rhythm of speaking and listening is the bedrock for dialogue in Imago Theory and for all of us who care about relationship.
Helen LaKelly Hunt
There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it--and almost all of us have one way or another--this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.
James Baldwin
I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.
Rebecca Solnit
Our natural rights come from an authority beyond the petty rule of man.
Bryant McGill
There is no right and wrong, and precepts are for fools. Every thing is just as it is! And we must experience things without condemning them, because if we condemn them, then we are becoming too involved.
Ru Freeman
Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
Gloria Steinem
All the time, circumstances are not going to favor us. We shall have toface obstacles and adversities. Fearlessness is the first virtue of a hero, thestarting point of all other noble virtues.
Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar
There is a difference between giving-up and strategic disengagement. Know the difference.
Bryant McGill
Life is an illusion which wisely prevents you from seeing yourself fully.
Bryant McGill
We never get over our fathers, and we’re not required to. (Irish Proverb)
Martin Sheen
When rain comes finally, washing away a low sky of muddy ocher, we who could not control the phenomenon are pressed into relief. The near-occult feeling: The face of being witness to the end of the world gives way to tangible things. Even if the succeeding sensations are not common, they are at least not mysterious.
Maya Angelou
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat.
Arundhati Roy
There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It's like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: it's raining today and it's going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century.
Elie Wiesel
Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.
Arundhati Roy
Fashion exerts more power in science than it does on the shape of hats.
Simone Weil
The conflicts we have with the outside world are often conflicts we have within ourselves.
Bryant McGill
Peace requires the provision of a platform for discussion and the exchange of information on matters and activities relevant to the prevention of armed violence.
Widad Akreyi
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE... AND THANK EVERYONE... WHO TRIES... TO BRING SMILE BACK... TO THIS WOMAN
Widad Akreyi
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND REMIND EVERYONEOF THE SUFFERING...OF THE ENSLAVED...YAZIDI WOMEN
Widad Akreyi
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE... AND REMIND EVERYONE... OF THE RAPE OF THE YAZIDI WOMEN
Widad Akreyi
I will follow anyone... and remind everyone... that their fear is genuine.
Widad Akreyi
I will follow anyone... and remind everyone... of the pain of the Yazidi women
Widad Akreyi
YAZIDIS AND CHRISTIANS WANT TO BE FREE OF NIGHT MIST AND BEHEADING DRIFT!
Widad Akreyi
Conflict avoidance often causes greater conflict.
Bryant McGill
Peace does not mean an absence of conflict, because opposition, polarity and conflict are natural and universal laws.
Bryant McGill
There is no way to escape conflict in life, and there is no way to escape peace in life.
Bryant McGill
Conflict connects us to life, just as life connects us to conflict.
Bryant McGill
Peace is a way of constructively handling natural conflict.
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
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND THANK EVERYONEWHO TRIES TO MAKEA DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVESOF VULNERABLE CIVILIANS
Widad Akreyi
No ONE MENTIONS YOUR TEARS, SADNESS OR SLOW DEATH! BUT, WE FEEL YOUR FALLEN TEARS, YOUR BEHEADED BODIES, YOUR RAPED DIGNITY!
Widad Akreyi