Quotes by Activists - Page 28

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and criticize others who have to fight for the things you take for granted.
DaShanne Stokes
Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.
Maya Angelou
It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.
Ashton Applewhite
If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today - even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement - invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.
Frank B. Wilderson III
So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.
Tim Wise
And in "Elbow Room" the cast sings the glories of westward expansion in the United States, which involved the murder of native peoples and the violent conquest of half of Mexico. Among the lines in the song is one that intones, "There were plenty of fights / To win land right / But the West was meant to be / It was our Manifest Destiny?" Let it suffice to say that happily belting out a tune in which one merrily praises genocide is always easier for those whose ancestors weren't on the receiving end of the deal.
Tim Wise
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
James Baldwin
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Audre Lorde
Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating. It's just plain wrong.
Muhammad Ali
We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.
Fred Hampton
Change represents the real spirit of democracy and the real America.
Bryant McGill
Now I've been criticized for advocating that people push their boundaries because sometimes people get caught. Sometimes people get fired. Sometimes people lose their jobs because of pushing the boundaries too far, but it's an interesting experience. They found they didn't want to stay within those limitations that they were pushing. Once people find they can survive outside the limits, they're much happier. They don't want to feel trapped. So I think we can urge people to push the boundaries as far as they can, and if they get in trouble, fine; that's not too bad if that's what they want to do.
Myles Horton
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
To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect and their oneness, and should insist upon choosing as their representatives only such persons as are good and true.
Mahatma Gandhi
Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.
Eli Pariser
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
I think it is dangerous to confuse the idea of democracy with elections. Just because you have elections doesn't mean you're a democratic country. They're a very vitally important part of a democracy. But there are other things that ought to function as checks and balances. If elections are the only thing that matter, then people are going to resort to anything to win that election.
Arundhati Roy
The single greatest tool for making moral people commit atrocities is group affiliation. The single greatest tool for promoting global human rights and equality is to end group affiliation.
Heather Marsh
I sat at a lunch table with a professor of premonotheistic spirituality, plus several women from some of the tribes in this state that has more Native Americans than any other. All agreed that the paradigm of human organization had been the circle, not the pyramid or hierarchy—and it could be again. I’d never known there was a paradigm that linked instead of ranked. It was as if I’d been assuming opposition—and suddenly found myself in a welcoming world; like putting one’s foot down for a steep stair and discovering level ground. Still, when a Laguna law student from New Mexico complained that her courses didn’t cite the Iroquois Confederacy as the model for the U.S. Constitution—or explain that this still existing Confederacy was the oldest continuing democracy in the world—I thought she was being romantic. But I read about the Constitutional Convention and discovered that Benjamin Franklin had indeed cited the Iroquois Confederacy as a model. He was well aware of its success in unifying vast areas of the United States and Canada by bringing together Native nations for mutual decisions but also allowing autonomy in local ones. He hoped the Constitution could do the same for the thirteen states. That’s why he invited two Iroquois men to Philadelphia as advisers. Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women?
Gloria Steinem
We are now at risk of having a zombie democracy roaming around a one-party state.
Jeremy Corbyn
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 in a prison of our own minds holding our own chains around us. We create our oligarchs and fight for their right to oppress us.
Heather Marsh
Without a sharp turnaround toward democracy and equality in the United States, Europe will be virtually alone in its commitment to social democracy. The pressures of low-wage immigrant labor, cheap imports from Eastern Europe and Asia, and free-market practices of governments are already threatening once secure areas of employment and causing right-wing populism to pop up in various Western European countries. Surprising numbers of middle-class and working-class voters have supported ultranationalist, neofascist parties throughout Europe because, like white male workers in the United States, they see their status slipping.
Steve Brouwer
The author also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy (in Haiti, a year after the catastrophic denouement of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia). ... Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not upheld in Haiti.
Stan Goff
Changing entrenched systems is daunting; the odds against reshaping the nation's police forces are high. But there are few things more important than making sure their profession is the brave, honorable service it should be. We have to do it, or watch our communities and our democracy disintegrate.
Ann Medlock
The changes that take place when liberal Democrats replace not so liberal or compassionate Republicans (or Democrats) are merely cosmetic.
David T. Dellinger
As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.
Rebecca Solnit
Corporations are not legal “persons” with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.
Kalle Lasn
Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.
Alice Walker
Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.
Simone Weil
Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
Rebecca Solnit
I have witnessed how the power of listening, storytelling and embracing gray areas breaks through the rigid 'us vs. them.
Aspen Baker
Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.
Rebecca Solnit
To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.
Rebecca Solnit
Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.
Eli Clare
You are nothing less than a miracle!
Bryant McGill
Being alone will show you who you really are, and if you cannot get-on positively as the sole master of your space in that room alone, then you can absolutely forget about it after you add another person.
Bryant McGill
Key message to all patients: Let go of all negativity and empower your body through your positivity.
Widad Akreyi
When it comes to your career, you must always try and allow the positive aspects of your character to dictate what happens to you. Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.
Russell Brand
Playful, positive sarcasm is different from negative mean sarcasm, and many people don't know the difference.
Bryant McGill
Surround yourself with beautiful and positive people, who love you and believe in you.
Bryant McGill
When you are positive you are the enabling force of possibility.
Bryant McGill
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
Oh judge! Your damn laws! The good people don't need them, and the bad people don't obey them.
Ammon Hennacy
The world has been loaned to humanity by the universal powers of creation.
Bryant McGill
Dare not surrender to weakness you divine creation!
Bryant McGill
No matter the source of our creation let us give honor to that source.
Bryant McGill
The Infinite struck the void with the sound of the Word.
Marek Halter
All of the important acts of creation and destruction involve the issuance of words and the application of signature.
Bryant McGill
A beam from the everlasting sun of God.Rude and unresponsive are the stones;Yet in them divine things lie concealed;I hear their imprisoned chant:–“We are fragments of the universe,Chips of the rock whereon God laid the foundation of the world:
Helen Keller
I don’t have perfect teeth. I’m not stick thin. I want to be the person who feels great in her body and can say that she loves it and doesn’t want to change anything.
Emma Watson
Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.
Barbara Ehrenreich
There is an enlightened way to flow with, in, and through conflict.
Bryant McGill
The unseen essential awaits your enlightened heart's ascension to love.
Bryant McGill
I appreciate my my sleep In sleep my conversation is witty My home is dusted My office work is up to date The dog is even well behaved And food is on the table on timeBut then when I'm asleep I don't have you to clutter and confuseMy hungry heart
Nikki Giovanni
I have always felt that the true text-book for the pupil is his teacher
Mahatma Gandhi
You must firmly, absolutely and ruthlessly protect your safety and sanity.
Bryant McGill
Your pain and struggles only serve to remind you that you are alive.
Bryant McGill
The world's only lessons are tension and fear — relax into yourself.
Bryant McGill