Quotes by Activists - Page 24

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
We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.
Kalle Lasn
This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they ‘true believers’, driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered greed while still invoking an altruistic motive?
Naomi Klein
In the global marketplace of the future the price of every product will tell the ecological truth.
Kalle Lasn
The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and reprogrammed.
Kalle Lasn
The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:a certain amount of difficultyplusa certain amount of your friendsplusa certain amount of interesting strangersplusa certain amount of rewardplusa certain amount of opportunityequaledfun
Cory Doctorow
Children who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: 'My worth is my sexuality. I'm dirty and shameful. I have no right to my own physical boundaries.' That shapes their ideas about the world around them: 'No one will believe me. Telling the truth results in bad consequences. People can't be trusted.' It doesn't take long for children to being to act in accordance with these belief systems.For girls who have experienced incest, sexual abuse, or rape, the boundaries between love, sex, and pain become blurred. Secrets are normal, and shame is a constant.
Rachel Lloyd
Women are not wrong if they react instinctively – often jealously – against their partner’s interest in porn, since pornography is actually, neurologically, a woman’s destructive rival for her man’s sexual capabilities.
Naomi Wolf
The failure of reorientation therapy is why the "ex-gay" ministry Exodus International shut down in 2013. It places gay Christians who adhere to the traditional biblical interpretation in an agonizing, irresolvable tension. In order to truly flee from sin as well as the temptation to sin, they must constantly attempt what has proven impossible: to reconstitute themselves so they are no longer sexual beings at all.
Matthew Vines
To understand women who look both ways requires hearing their stories, not just noting the sex of their current partner. And when you listen closely, it's apparent these women have learned something crucial in these relationships.
Jennifer Baumgardner
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
We don’t ask when people age out of singing, or eating ice cream; why would we stop making love?
Ashton Applewhite
Nowhere is ageism more sexist, and vicious, than in the domain of sexuality.
Ashton Applewhite
Then he say something that really surprise me cause it so thoughtful and common sense. When it come to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody's guess is as good as mine. But when you talk about love I don't have to guess. I have love and I have been love. And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan.
Alice Walker
Guys hung out all the time. It didn’t mean they were gay. But when you are gay, you automatically think everybody knows and wonder if you’re safe.
Sean Kennedy
We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.
Naomi Wolf
The sudden surge of hormones at teenage age will continue to play an important part in the life of young people
Oche Otorkpa
Faith reminds us that change is always possible.
Jim Wallis
Two of the greatest hungers in our world today are the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social change. The connection between the two is the one the world is waiting for, especially the new generation. And the first hunger will empower the second.
Jim Wallis
A church that is committed to Christian Community Development sees not only the soul of a person as significant but also his or her whole life on Earth. It is being completely pro-life for a person, not only eternally, but also as the person lives on this earth. Therefore, Christian Community Development sees that the Church must be involved in every aspect of a person's life. In order to accomplish the wholistic aspect of ministry, pastors and leaders must be networkers. Christian Community Development builds coalitions in communities so that they can work together to solve the problems.
Robert Lupton
Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
Elie Wiesel
The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.
Marge Piercy
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
Courage is knowing that you're beaten and forging ahead anyway.
Zach Wahls
Free your mind and free yourself from brand slavery.
Bryant McGill
When we become acquainted with any person on a human level, even a great enemy, we begin to see that no person is really so different from ourselves.
Bryant McGill
Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers — and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.
Margaret Sanger
Make your life a tribute equal to the magnitude of the gift of life.
Bryant McGill
It doesn't matter who you are. Everyone's fear is equal.
Bryant McGill
This document [the Reconstruction and Development Programme] was translated into a simpler manifesto called 'A Better Life for All', which in turn became the ANC's campaign slogan.
Nelson Mandela
You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.
Arthur Ashe
It is not my ambition to marry a white woman or swim in a white pool. It is political equality that we want.
Nelson Mandela
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
It takes no compromise to give people their rights...it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.
Harvey Milk
The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.
Julian Bond
How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control.
Rebecca Solnit
All definitions are a part of the intellectual dissection and compartmentalization of control.
Bryant McGill
Information is controlled because the free flow of truth is not always expedient for those wishing to maintain control.
Bryant McGill
When you release yourself from the need for approval and control you can stop punishing yourself and others.
Bryant McGill
All defensiveness stems from the need to be right and frustration over not being able to control others.
Bryant McGill
Western "freedom" is a sophisticated form of control.
Bryant McGill
When you release the illusion of control, you begin an effortless free-fall toward a grand reunion with your original self.
Bryant McGill
If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.
Jerry Mander
The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.
Derrick Jensen
remember this: When you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised. With what you have learned...you know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. Don't anybody raise you from the way you have been raised. Know you will have to make adaptations, in love, in relationships, in friends, in society, in work, but don't let anybody change your mind.
Maya Angelou
Since the day I decided to become sober and a mother, I've been trying to become who I am supposed to be.
Glennon Doyle Melton
Because my mother couldn't change my present, I decided to change my daughter's future
Manal Al-Sharif
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
Elie Wiesel
What is unbelief but the despair, dictated by the dominant powers, that nothing can really change?
Ched Myers
Do not despair. Have faith. It is going to work out and you will be delivered.
Bryant McGill
Good things come to us just when we need them the most, like an angel throwing us a life-preserver before we go under the waters of despair.
Bryant McGill
In the moments of your deepest need, despair and desperation, what you need more than any other thing, is calm and faith.
Bryant McGill
Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.
Rebecca Solnit
The sooner growing older is stripped of reflexive dread, the better equipped we are to benefit from the countless ways in which it can enrich us.
Ashton Applewhite
Apathetic to my pity party, God interrupted in a thunderous Voice with the words, “For we walk by faith, not by sight!” 2 Corinthians 5: 7 resounded in my head as I scribbled it down and smacked it up on my wall. There, I thought. Now it’s up on my wall where I have to look at it every day.
Shelley Lubben