Quotes by Activists - Page 2

First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man
Alice Walker
When the voices of doubt start whispering, turn-up the volume of faith and listen to your heart.
Bryant McGill
If you do not like a certain behavior in others, look within yourself to find the roots of what discomforts you.
Bryant McGill
Find comfort in questioning yourself.
Bryant McGill
In their quest to hit cloud Nine, our young men and women intheir prime are gradually finding themselves on ground Zero,emotionally battered, academically bankrupt and medicallyparalyzed.
Oche Otorkpa
If you are rude, cynical, habitually-sarcastic or pessimistic, your life options are going to be very limited.
Bryant McGill
We live in a country where our young ladies who have recently attained the age of puberty cannot afford sanitary pads, but our men and women in public offices have ipads which they do not even know how to use.
Patrick L.O. Lumumba
IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.
Lundy Bancroft
The central attitudes driving Mr. Sensitive are:I’m against the macho men, so I couldn’t be abusive.As long as I use a lot of “psychobabble,” no one is going to believe that I am mistreating you.I can control you by analyzing how your mind and emotions work, and what your issues are from childhood.I can get inside your head whether you want me there or not.Nothing in the world is more important than my feelings.Women should be grateful to me for not being like those other men.
Lundy Bancroft
A man’s beliefs about the effects of the substance will largely be borne out. If he believes that alcohol can make him aggressive, it will, as research has shown. On the other hand, if he doesn’t attribute violence-causing powers to substances, he is unlikely to become aggressive even when severely intoxicated.
Lundy Bancroft
Physical aggression by a man toward his partner is abuse, even if it happens only once. If he raises a fist; punches a hole in the wall; throws things at you; blocks your way; restrains you; grabs, pushes, or pokes you; or threatens to hurt you, that’s physical abuse. He is creating fear and using your need for physical freedom and safety as a way to control you.
Lundy Bancroft
Addiction does not cause partner abuse, and recovery from addiction does not “cure” partner abuse.
Lundy Bancroft
Abuse grows from attitudes and values, not feelings. The roots are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control.
Lundy Bancroft
In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss. By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance.
Gloria Steinem
I fall in love with human beings based on who they are, not based on what they do or what sex they are.
Shailene Woodley
A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
Andrea Dworkin
It is an amazing contradiction: a society that frowns on a woman going out without a man; that forces you to use separate entrances for universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females cannot sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone.
Manal Al-Sharif
She took my papers, the papers that had followed me from the Khobar police station to jail, and pointed at a place where I was supposed to sign. On the paper there was a line for charges. In the blank space, someone had written “driving while female.
Manal Al-Sharif
How beautiful it is to live in a world with no walls.
Manal Al-Sharif
We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they hadimposed upon us.
Manal Al-Sharif
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
Mahatma Gandhi
Information is controlled because the free flow of truth is not always expedient for those wishing to maintain control.
Bryant McGill
I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don’t think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.
Hyeonseo Lee
A blind pursuit of cheap popularity has nothing to do with revolu
Nelson Mandela
Your worst enemy is not the person in opposition to you. It is the person occupying the spot you would be fighting from and doing nothing.
Heather Marsh
I want to live in a liberated intersectional society. As long as inequality and discrimination exists, I cannot be satisfied with the life that we are forced to live. Everyone deserves to lead the life they want to and not what is prescribed for them. We must be who we want to be. In this we must be happy.I am also tired of seeing black people fight to live. This is what drives my activism. I literally (as clichéd as it sounds), dream of a moment where we can be free to exist as we want to.
Malebo Sephodi
Loving is like any other art-craft where the masters have carefully practiced and where the novices have languished in their carelessness.
Bryant McGill
Reach deep within, and reconnect with the essence of your being.
Bryant McGill
The powerlessness of people with pure intentions, in the long run, can sometimes be more powerful than power in the hands of those blinded or depraved by evil tempers.
Widad Akreyi
How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production?
Arundhati Roy
You can never know where you are going unless you know where you have been.
Amelia Boynton
You are responsible for doing what good you can with what you have, and any good is better than none.
Bryant McGill
A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.
James Baldwin
Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.
Tim Wise
...After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality.The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.
Tim Wise
We must tell the world that even though we elected a bigot, bigotry will not prevail.
DaShanne Stokes
Saying something is 'politically correct' is often a way of dismissing the voices of the oppressed.
DaShanne Stokes
Now I have very little respect for the electoral system in the United States. I could have respected it in the early days, when the country was small and we had small population. The system that we have in the United States was set up at a time when the total population was the population of Tennessee. We've stretched it to try to make it work for different kind of problems and in stretching and adapting it, we've lost its meaning. We still have the form but not the meaning. There's a lot of things that we have to look at critically that might have been useful at one time that are no longer useful I think there's some good in everything. There's some bad in everything. But there's so little good in some things that you know for practical purposes they're useless. They're beyond salvation. There's so much good in some things, even though there's bad, that we build on that.
Myles Horton
Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honour them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means.
Arundhati Roy
All my years campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.
Gloria Steinem
We are never taught more deeply and more truthfully than by pain.
Bryant McGill
Sometimes, to escape a bad relationship and reclaim our lives, we have to break a piece of our heart off, like a wolf chews its leg off to escape a steel trap.
Bryant McGill
Misery loves good company, so if you are surrounded with drama, gossip and fools you may want to consider that you are presently at risk of becoming one of them.
Bryant McGill
Your uniqueness is the greatest gift you will ever receive in life.
Bryant McGill
You are the grand estate and administrator of — now.
Bryant McGill
Governments are the deadliest terrorist organizations that have ever existed if body count means anything.
Bryant McGill
Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
Naomi Klein
In spiritual moments we nearly perceive a grand, divine conspiracy of interconnectedness between us and everything.
Bryant McGill
Bigotry and sexism destroy the unity needed for a nation to live.
DaShanne Stokes
Each person is a vast territory of undiscovered mystery as nebulous and uncharted as the deepest oceans and expanses of space.
Bryant McGill
Love surrounds, softens and tires violence and force.
Bryant McGill
TV is a pornographic cacophony of violence, death obsession, screams, gunfire and drama. You think it's fine because you are damaged.
Bryant McGill
More violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction.
Maajid Nawaz
Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.
Mahatma Gandhi
We depend on this planet to eat, drink, breathe, and live. Figuring out how to keep our life support system running needs to be our number-one priority. Nothing is more important than finding a way to live together - justly, respectfully, sustainably, joyfully - on the only planet we can call home.
Annie Leonard
We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe.When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each others' throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.
Arundhati Roy
Adoption isn't just a childhood experience, it's a life-long experience.
DaShanne Stokes
His voice was reassuring and calm, his expression soft, his eyes brighter than ever. Oh Ahura Mazda, she’d never wanted any man so intently in all her life. She ached to have him touch her, kiss her, taste her. And Ivar did as she wished. He put her hand to his nose to smell her skin, kissed her inner wrist to taste her, his lips lingered over her racing pulse. Finally, it was confirmed in actions and direct words, spoken aloud and repeated seven times… She felt the rush of desire ripping through her body, an intense sensation of warmth upon her skin, the blissful waves of uneasiness swamped through her, tingling her nerves.
Widad Akreyi
A moment later, Vesta became aware that her life was passing her by in that busy city, where no man could capture her heart… What if she married someone, who wasn’t mentally prepared to keep his Zoroastrian identity intact? Or what if her future husband was forced to convert to Islam? What if he tried to force her to convert as well? What if he suddenly decided to become an extremist and called for Sharia Laws in Kurdland? She shivered at the thought.
Widad Akreyi
Criticism is no threat to your self-esteem or identity, but rather informs you.
Bryant McGill