Quotes by Activists - Page 26

Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality...laughter is an orgasm of the mind.
Gloria Steinem
Reach deep within, and reconnect with the essence of your being.
Bryant McGill
In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.
Mahatma Gandhi
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Mahatma Gandhi
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
An new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.
Marge Piercy
There is no battle or engagement with any institution, company or government; it is always an engagement of ideas.
Bryant McGill
No belief or idea is sacred, unless it treats all people as sacred
Bryant McGill
During intellectual droughts one shower of good ideas can cause a flash-flood to wash away the roads your habits travel.
Bryant McGill
People have some really crazy ideas about love, friends and relationships. They have the absurd belief that their friends, children, family, lovers and companions can make them happy.
Bryant McGill
Profound thoughts arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas, but also dubious ideas.
Andrei Sakharov
I lived through this horror, and no one can tell me I have to stay quiet."I have been silenced long enough, and I will not allow that family to silence me again. I will continue to speak out and make sure my voice is heard.
Erin Merryn
When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?
Naomi Klein
In order to break free from the chains that bind, one must take whatever action they can to disconnect internally from the larger systems of oppression, of which the family unit is merely a microcosm.
Sil Lai Abrams
I don't want other people to decide what I am. I want to decide that for myself.
Emma Watson
I'm trying to strip myself down to my barest essentials so I can figure out where I begin and where the woman the world told me to be begins. I'm going back to the starting line.
Glennon Doyle Melton
I have decided that I'm ready to stop destroying myself and start creating. I have already accepted my invitation and no one will convince me again that I'm not worthy. Not ever again. I have been invited and I have said Yes. My Yes is final.
Glennon Doyle Melton
In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.
Naomi Klein
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
Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?
Arundhati Roy
Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work.
Arundhati Roy
Oh, and 13.1 million American people had their homes foreclosed. Because their debt, it turns out, was real; it was only the debt within the financial sector that was imaginary. It was only the people who generated the crisis who got three magical wishes from an economic genie. There was no abracadabra for ordinary people; they just got abraca-fucked.
Russell Brand
Advertising expresses a power relationship . . . One person, the advertiser, invades; millions absorb. And to what end? So that people will buy something! A deep, profound and disturbing act by the few against the many for a trivial purpose.
Jerry Mander
Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just "human rights," and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.
Arundhati Roy
Ronald Reagan goes around saying that Nicaragua is communist and that communism is a threat to Central America. Why doesn't he say that he's a big capitalist, and that capitalism has made a great mess of Central America? Why doesn't he talk about what capitalism has done? We don't know what communism is, but we sure know what capitalism has done for us!
Elvia Alvarado
Revolutionary law number one," someone said. "Capitalism has cheated us. Books are not to be bought, they are to be repossessed.""This is robbery," I said. "Let's not kid ourselves. And don't do that to me again. You scared me to death.""It's not robbery. Books are ideas. They should be able to circulate freely within society. At no price at all, or for pennies. Knowledge is universal. It belongs to all of us.
Gioconda Belli
It's the last great free-for-all robbery of everybody's earth.
Marge Piercy
Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year—and setting their compensation for themselves—are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages.
Michael Harrington
It's very contradictory for a man to teach about the murder in corporate capitalism, to isolate and expose the murderers behind it, to instruct that these madmen are completely without stops, are licentious, totally depraved — and then not make adequate preparations to defend himself from the madman's attack. Either they don't really believe their own spiel or they harbor some sort of subconscious death wish.
George L. Jackson
A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we've been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be left in the hands of a deregulated market system. And absolutely there are people that are at the far other end of the spectrum that want to communalize all property and abolish private property, but in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it's between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we've made a social contract to say, 'That's not a good place to have the profit motive govern.' Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. So even something like firefighting—it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn't something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don't want a market for fire.
Naomi Klein
The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.
Helen Keller
I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.
Endesha Ida Mae Holland
There is an element of selfishness to this, I suppose. It feels pretty good to be able to so quickly help someone. That is, after all, one of the great emotional payoffs of medicine. That isn't to say that ECT is either a panacea or without flaws - but when used in the right way for the right purposes it's of great benefit, and condemning it because it isn't perfect would lead to more suffering and harm, no less.
Kitty Dukakis
...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.
Ghada Karmi
...I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.
Julie Gregory
Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey.
Hyeonseo Lee
For the achiever the battle with critics is a slow war of attrition. Let time do the dirty work for you.
Bryant McGill
I am alone. I am here. No one is watching me. In these hours of silence that I cherish, I talk to myself and reflect. That past, entrenched in time, motionless and infinite, has vanished onto thin air. None of it remains. Why, therefore, am I hurting so much? Why did I bring back with me this nameless pain? I followed the path I set for myself, and I have forgiven. I do not want to be chained to hatred or resentment. I want to have the right to live in peace.
Ingrid Betancourt
If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it’s almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up.
Maya Angelou
Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.
Maya Angelou
You can never know where you are going unless you know where you have been.
Amelia Boynton
There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.
Mahatma Gandhi
Accept the fullness in life's balance, which demands that there are positive gifts along with adversity.
Bryant McGill
A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.
Helen Keller
We must step out of our digital avatars, and come together and have face-to-face dialogue as often as possible.
Bryant McGill
The time for revolt is now, and the time for revolt is always!
Bryant McGill
Your personal declaration of will is the first step in a seemingly impossible journey.
Bryant McGill
So while this is a book about fighting back, in the end this is a book about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love. They need your heart because they are disappearing, slipping into that longest night of extinction, and the resistance is nowhere in sight. We will have to build that resistance from whatever comes to hand: whispers and prayers, history and dreams, from our bravest words and braver actions. It will be hard, there will be a cost, and in too many implacable dawns it will seem impossible. But we will have to do it anyway. So gather your heart and join with every living being. With love as our First Cause, how can we fail?
Derrick Jensen
As she climbed down from the stage, I thought: This is what courage is. It's not just living through the nightmare, it's doing something with it afterward. It's being brave enough to talk about it to other people. It's trying to organize to change things.
Leslie Feinberg
I am constantly reminded that we are a products of the choices we make
Oche Otorkpa
I did it, and it's all right. Even the worst experiences were right in their time, because otherwise, it wouldn't have come to this point. That was your road, and you had to walk it.
Michael "Bommi" Baumann
No,nobody but nobody can make it out her alone.
Maya Angelou
Pastor Russell lived in nearby Pittsburgh and said that there was no hell. This was terrible for we all knew that everyone but the Baptists were going there, so to believe there was no hell upset all the countryside theology.
Ammon Hennacy
There were so many desperate people on the street crying for help that you had to shut off your heart or the pain would be too much. After a while, you can´t care anymore. And that is what hell is like.
Yeonmi Park
The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
Rebecca Solnit
This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they encounter it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and long-term social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this ear's potential paradises is in hell.
Rebecca Solnit
I believe that theology is facing the abyss.I must face the abyss, the abyss of existence, the abyss of mystery. (Rubem Alves, p. 189)
Mev Puleo
Truly, I've learned more theology living in poor neighborhoods than in classrooms. At times I wonder if the questions of traditional theology have any meaning for the poor. And "the poor" here mean eighty percent of the population! (Ivone Gebara, p. 209)
Mev Puleo
We are our own worst enemy and make no mistake we are destroying ourselves.
Bryant McGill