Quotes by Activists - Page 2

When you unlock your pleasure, you unlock your power. And that can change anything..." -Sheerah, Donny and Ursula Save the World.
Sharon Weil
Terror doesn't change people from gay to straight. It just hurts innocent people.
DaShanne Stokes
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
James Baldwin
The Constitution itself, the DNA of the country, can be altered by the collective will of the people, making America a self-evolving and self-writing program.
Bryant McGill
Because of propaganda induced cognitive dissonance, most people hate themselves and don't even know it.
Bryant McGill
They have never put it into words, they cannot; but each absence is a threat. They never felt this way in New York - they moved all over New York. Here each is afraid that one of the others will get into some terrible trouble before he is seen again, and before anyone can help him. It is the spirit of the people, the eyes which endlessly watch them, eyes which never meet their eyes. Something like lust, something like hatred, seems to hover in the air along the country roads, shifting like mist or steam, but always there, gripping the city streets like fog, making every corner a dangerous corner. They spend more of themselves, each day, than they can possibly afford, they are living beyond their means; they drop into bed each evening, exhausted, into an exhausting sleep. And no one can help them. The people who live here know how to do it - so it seems, anyway - but they cannot teach the secret. The secret can be learned only by watching, by emulating the models, by dangerous trial and possibly mortal error.
James Baldwin
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
Boys’ aggressiveness is increasingly being treated as a medical problem, particularly in schools, a trend that has led to the diagnosing and medicating of boys whose problem may really be that they have been traumatized and influenced by exposure to violence and abuse at home. Treating these boys as though they have a chemical problem not only overlooks the distress they are in but also reinforces their belief that they are “out of control” or “sick,” rather than helping them to recognize that they are making bad choices based on destructive values. I have sometimes heard adults telling girls that they should be flattered by boys’ invasive or aggressive behavior “because it means they really like you,” an approach that prepares both boys and girls to confuse love with abuse and socializes girls to feel helpless.
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 the Soviet Union you weren’t allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.
Kalle Lasn
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 waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.
Derrick Jensen
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
The matter came up for judicial investigation, but as might have been expected, the white people concluded it was unnecessary to wait the result of the investigation—that it was preferable to hang the accused first and try him afterward.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
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
People often call fighting racism being 'PC' when they don't want to confront their own prejudice
DaShanne Stokes
It's illegal to deny people their records due to race or gender. Adoptees deserve the same rights and protections.
DaShanne Stokes
Never be content to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon. Your rights could be next.
DaShanne Stokes
We must tell the world that even though we elected a bigot, bigotry will not prevail.
DaShanne Stokes
Bigotry is based on deception, of oneself and of others.
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
My conclusions, on this point, are as follows: when the Law Commission says committal of judgment debtors is an anomaly that cannot be justified and should be abolished; when it is common cause that there is a general international move away from imprisonment for civil debt, of which the present committal proceedings are an adapted relic; when such imprisonment has been abolished in South Africa, save for its contested form as contempt of court in the magistrate's court; when the clauses concerned have already been interpreted by the Courts as restrictively as possible, without their constitutionally offensive core being eviscerated; when other tried and tested methods exist for recovery of debt from those in a position to pay; when the violation of the fundamental right to personal freedom is manifest, and the procedures used must inevitably possess a summary character if they are to be economically worthwhile to the creditor, then the very institution of civil imprisonment, however it may be described and however well directed its procedures might be, in itself must be regarded as highly questionable and not a compelling claimant for survival.
Albie Sachs
Severability is an important concept in the context of the relations between this Court and Parliament; like 'reading down', it is an instrument of judicial restraint which reduces the danger of producing an overbroad judicial reaction to overbroad legislation.
Albie Sachs
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