Quotes by Activists - Page 30

The vile are trampled beneath the feet of other pigs.
Bryant McGill
All identification is for control and ownership.
Bryant McGill
Life is a practice. When you 'fail,' you can immediately begin practicing again.
Bryant McGill
Immediate gratification is a dream killer.
Bryant McGill
Governments are the deadliest terrorist organizations that have ever existed if body count means anything.
Bryant McGill
The only way out of your problems is straight through them.
Bryant McGill
Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.
Marian Wright Edelman
The satyagrahi enters the jail cell as the bridegroom enters the bridal chamber
M.K Gandhi
But SACRIFICE does not mean 'death' at all. It means MAKING HOLY
Edward Carpenter
No wonder God chose this dark land to send prophets to, for a candle only shines in the dark.
Rami Ollaik
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
I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.
Helen Keller
Those who see the world through the lens of love are the true visionaries.
Bryant McGill
The dreamer's untamed eye sees beyond the illusions to the heart of what is real.
Bryant McGill
The goal is not to answer these questions. The goal is to be present to them with all that we are. In a way we are following the poet Rilke's advice when he counseled the young artist, "be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along into the answer.
Adam Bucko
With commitment and vision, it is possible to build a bridge between potential partners and communities whose work is of relevance to peace-building initiatives.
Widad Akreyi
Hold faithfully to your unique vision and your detractors will eventually tire and give-up.
Bryant McGill
We must always strive to reflect the highest vision of ourselves.
Bryant McGill
Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.
James Baldwin
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision.
Helen Keller
The revolution of consciousness is connected to the food revolution
Bryant McGill
In spiritual moments we nearly perceive a grand, divine conspiracy of interconnectedness between us and everything.
Bryant McGill
The poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses.
Helen Keller
Nature is the ultimate technology; a technology we are still too immature, arrogant, possessive and careless to care for responsibly.
Bryant McGill
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.
Cory Doctorow
Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days
Eli Pariser
To speak of television as 'neutral' and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns.
Jerry Mander
If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers' behaviour becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. One technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbiotic relationships among technologies themselves.
Jerry Mander
We're at a crucial point in history. We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, whilst simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water and a stable climate. This generation can have one or the other but not both. Humanity must make a choice. Both have an opportunity cost. Gadgetry or nature? Pick the wrong one and the next generations may have neither.
Mark Boyle
[T]he problem was too much information. The population was being inundated with conflicting versions of increasingly complex events. People were giving up on understanding anything. The glut of information was dulling awareness, not aiding it. Overload. It encouraged passivity, not involvement.
Jerry Mander
Style has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can’t drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet. If we can’t have ham, we will boil chitterlings; if we are given rotten peaches, we will make cobblers; if given scraps, we will make quilts; take away our drums, and we will clap our hands. We prove the human spirit will prevail. We will take what we have to make what we need. We need confidence in our knowledge of who we are.
Nikki Giovanni
Each of us is called upon to take a stand. So in these days ahead, as we examine ourselves and each other, our works, our fears, our differences, our sisterhood and survivals, I urge you to tackle what is most difficult for us all, self-scrutiny of our complacencies, the idea that since each of us believes she is on the side of right, she need not examine her position.
Audre Lorde
The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks. But it's also a choose-your-own-adventure story.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Bigotry and sexism destroy the unity needed for a nation to live.
DaShanne Stokes
No time is better spent than that spent in the service of your fellow man.
Bryant McGill
I’m growing mushrooms… because I can’t kill them. They just keep multiplying…and it’s like…I’m in service to them.
Sharon Weil
Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
Marian Wright Edelman
For me, those weeks in Boston, with Wilma, became a lesson in her ability to be “of good mind,” in her phrase, which also meant a people’s ability to survive.
Gloria Steinem
The critics only made me work harder.
Muhammad Ali
Champions keep playing until they get it right.
Billie Jean King
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.
Mahatma Gandhi
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
Nelson Mandela
Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
It always seems impossible until it's done.
Nelson Mandela
I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.
Nelson Mandela
After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.
Nelson Mandela
The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.
Elie Wiesel
Each person is a vast territory of undiscovered mystery as nebulous and uncharted as the deepest oceans and expanses of space.
Bryant McGill
My mother always says when you fight destiny, destiny fights back. Some things, they're just written in the stars. You can try but you can never escape what's meant to be.
Aisha Saeed
For the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the goal is liberation: the cessation of suffering, the end of the endless hamster-wheel of dependent origination, of mental formations leading to desire leading to clinging leading to suffering and so on. Nibbana, or nirvana, was not originally conceived as some magical heavenly world, or even a permanent altered state of consciousness. It is usually described, in the early texts, negatively: as a candle being snuffed out.
Jay Michaelson
I am not a Buddhist. Yet there is a Buddhist story that I hold dear. A monk walks in a forest, and chances upon a tiger. The tiger chases him, and the monk runs until he comes to a cliff. With the tiger on his heels, the man grasps a vine and clambers down. Another tiger appears at the bottom. As the man hangs there, a mouse crawls from a crevice just beyond his reach and begins to gnaw the vine. Death above, death below, and death in between. He sees a big ripe strawberry near his mouth. It is delicious.In this moment, flying miles above the strawberry fields of California's San Joachin Valley, I think that I would change the ending of this story. Instead of giving the doomed man a strawberry, what if we leave him alone with the two tigers, the mouse, and the fraying vine? For the last time, his arms grow tired, he feels a familiar ache deep in his muscles. For the last time he catches his breath, feels a rasping in his throat and lungs. He feels this, and a thousand other things. It is all delicious.
Derrick Jensen
Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.
Mahatma Gandhi
In books, coaching sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. The most blatant of these, in my experience, was the EST-like, victim-blaming ideology represented by Patrick Knowles and the books he recommended to his boot-camp participants. Recall that at the boot camp, the timid suggestion that there might be an outer world defined by the market or ruled by CEOs was immediately rebuked; there was only us, the job seekers. It was we who had to change. In a milder form, the constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what you will it to be.
Barbara Ehrenreich
If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers.
Maya Angelou
We owe our children – the most vulnerable citizens in any society – a life free from violence and fear.
Nelson Mandela
We must realize that violence is not confined to physical violence. Fear is violence, caste discrimination is violence, exploitation of others, however subtle, is violence, segregation is violence, thinking ill of others and condemning others are violence. In order to reduce individual acts of physical violence, we must work to eliminate violence at all levels, mental, verbal, personal, and social, including violence to animals, plants, and all other forms of life.
Satish Kumar
We'd be the safest country in the world if the world knew we didn't have a gun. Men are not killed because they get mad at each other. They're killed because one has a gun.
Jeannette Rankin
Intolerance is a species of violence and therefore against our creed.
Mahatma Gandhi
All violence demands reform, and all violence desperately begs to be healed.
Bryant McGill
Since the human mind is the primary weapon of the human being, it is also therefore the primary and most significant instrument of violence.
Bryant McGill