Quotes by Activists - Page 31

We are all a part of a culture of violence that dominates every aspect of our lives.
Bryant McGill
We are all artificial and have been unnaturally changed by violence and unwholesome conditioning.
Bryant McGill
Modern consumer life is a form of extreme passive violence against all people.
Bryant McGill
Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.
Mahatma Gandhi
Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers.
Elie Wiesel
Education about gender and peace is important. Educational strategies to promote peace must consider all relations of dominance.
Widad Akreyi
As a product of Anglo-Saxon-Protestant culture, I am familiar with its centuries-old tradition of hiding its abuse of women under pretty packaging.
Lundy Bancroft
We have placed such idolatrous faith in our ability to protect ourselves that we call it more courageous to die killing than to die loving.
Shane Claiborne
Every time our government chooses to use military force to bring about change in the world, it once again teaches our children the myth of redemptive violence, the myth that violence can be an instrument for good.
Shane Claiborne
Through our expectations, we violently expand and try to fill the world with our proofs of worth.
Bryant McGill
Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence ... I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor...
Mahatma Gandhi
The system wears a mask of civility, yet will quickly reveal its true nature in the form of magnificently-purposed violence when needed.
Bryant McGill
Deeply-rooted conditioning has perverted us. We ARE the culture of violence. We must look at ourselves.
Bryant McGill
We are currently facing many hurdles, BUT will never lose the sight of infinite hope.
Widad Akreyi
Violence can be a gift. Violence belongs to everyone.
Bryant McGill
Love surrounds, softens and tires violence and force.
Bryant McGill
We are currently facing countless hurdles and obstacles, BUT will never lose the sight of infinite hope.
Widad Akreyi
Governments are committed to preserving the myth of their monopoly on violence. Violence belongs to everyone.
Bryant McGill
TV is a pornographic cacophony of violence, death obsession, screams, gunfire and drama. You think it's fine because you are damaged.
Bryant McGill
Violent revolution fails because it is not revolutionary enough. It changes the rulers but not the rules, the ends but not the means. Most of the old androcratic values and delusional assumptions remain intact.
Walter Wink
Further, any way of life based on the importation of resources is also functionally based on violence, because if your way of life requires the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable: if people in the next watershed over won't trade you for some necessary resource, you will take it, because you need it. So, to bring this to the present, we could all become enlightened, and the US military would still have to be huge: how else will they get access to the oil they need to run the economy, oil that just happens to lie under someone else's land? The point is that no matter what we think of the irredeemability of this culture's mass psychology or system of rewards, this culture–civilization–is also irredeemable on a purely functional level.
Aric McBay
He beat me when you not here, I say.Who do, she say, Albert?Mr ____, I say.I can't believe it, she say. She sit down on the bench next to me real hard, like she drop.What he beat you for? she ast.For being me and not you.
Alice Walker
It isn't a coincidence that the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat happened after September 11. Gujarat is also one place where the toxic waste of the World Trade Center is being dumped right now. This waste is being dumped in Gujarat, and then taken of to Ludhiana and places like that to be recycled. I think it's quite a metaphor. The demonization of Muslims has also been given legitimacy by the world's superpower, by the emperor himself. We are at a stage where democracy - this corrupted, scandalous version of democracy - is the problem. So much of what politicians do is with an eye on elections. Wars are fought as election campaigns. In India, Muslims are killed as part of election campaigns. In 1984, after the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, the Congress Party won, hands down. We must ask ourselves very serious questions about this particular brand of democracy.
Arundhati Roy
More violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction.
Maajid Nawaz
Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
Derrick Jensen
Let them have guns' is as much a solution to mass murder and gun violence as 'Let them have drugs' is a solution to drug addiction.
DaShanne Stokes
Commitment to nonviolence must not be based on patient acquiescence in intolerable conditions. Rather, it stems from a deeper knowledge of the self-defeating, self-corrupting effect of lapses into violence.
David T. Dellinger
When we allow violence against some, we enable violence against all.
DaShanne Stokes
Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure od the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.
Barbara Deming
Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat for it is momen
Mahatma Gandhi
Values carry the message of shared purposes, standards and conceptions of what is worth living for and what is worth striving for.
Anita Roddick
Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.
Kate Millett
Our value is mirrored back to us through success only when we share the treasure we already are.
Bryant McGill
Love is the compass which keeps every other value from becoming lost.
Bryant McGill
You will either have value, or be grist for the mill — nothing more.
Bryant McGill
In November, when our nation remembers her fallen soldiers and honours the lost youth of my generation, the Prime Minister, government leaders and the hollow men of business affix paper poppies to their lapels and afford the dead of war two minutes' silence. Afterwards, they speak golden platitudes about the struggle and the heroism of that time. Yet the words they speak are meaningless because they have surrendered the values my generation built after the horrors of the Second World War.
Harry Leslie Smith
Evolving and bettering yourself is wonderful, but not if the set of standards and values you adopt smothers you into oblivion in the process.
Bryant McGill
Believe it or not, you and your enemies want many of the same things and share values.
Bryant McGill
Be a peacemaker who values peace and takes peace everywhere you go.
Bryant McGill
Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.
Mahatma Gandhi
If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
Rebecca Solnit
Life is gassy you just have to blow through it to see clearly and if eventually you see through, don't be misleaded by what you see either good or bad.
Mark Abraham
We were born in the mist of time on this land together with the oaks and fir trees. We are bound to it not only by the bread and existence it furnishes us as we toil on it, but also by all the bones of our ancestors who sleep in its ground. All our parents are here. All our memories, all our war-like glory, all our history here, in this land lies buried. . . . By what right do the Jews wish to take this land from us? On what historical argument do they base their pretensions and particularly the audacity with which they defy us Romanians, here in our own land? We are bound to this land by millions of tombs and millions of unseen threads that only our soul feels, and woe to those who shall try to snatch us from it.
Corneliu Codreanu
Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves.
Mahatma Gandhi
There are congregations on nearly every corner. I'm not sure we need more churches. What we need is a church. I say one church is better than fifty. I have tried to remove the plural form churches from my vocabulary, training myself to think of the church as Christ did, and as the early Christians did. The metaphors for her are always singular – a body, a bride. I heard one gospel preacher say it like this, as he really wound up and broke a sweat: "We've got to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back for a bride not a harem.
Shane Claiborne
The Church is going to have to recognise that secularisation is not the cause of their decline, it is the result of it.
Keith Porteous Wood
What if evangelical mega churches became known around the world for things like providing water access for entire countries or fighting to end the AIDS pandemic? Imagine what integrity that would give to the good news we preach, especially the gospel that Jesus declares is good news to the poor.
Shane Claiborne
You telling me God love you, and you ain't never done nothing for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that?But if God love me, Celie, I don't have to do all that. Unless I want to. There's a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. Like what? I ast. Oh, she say. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time. Well, this sounds like blasphemy sure nuff. She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
Alice Walker
According to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today's churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Church's obsession with sexual restrictions is and always has been wrong wrong wrong. Wrong to be contemptuous of naïve young women like Philomena and me. Wrong to ignore the men involved in creating "illegitimate" children. Wrong to demonize gays while knowing full well how many men and women of the Church are gay. Wrong to excuse and hide criminal priests, transferring them to new, unsuspecting parishes. Wrong to think that forbidding consensual human sexuality is more important than Christ's message of compassion and forgiveness.
Ann Medlock
The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.
Shane Claiborne
the church was an international institution long before globalization.
Shane Claiborne
I obeyed, but my crime was that I did not look obedient.
Tehmina Durrani
Crime must be brought under control... Freedom without civility, freedom without the ability to live in peace, was not true freedom at all.
Nelson Mandela
Mothers should be very careful what type of boys and men they create, or allow to be created.
Bryant McGill
There is something beautiful in you seeking freedom.
Bryant McGill
We must strive for literacy and education that teach us to never quit questioning and probing at the assumptions of the day.
Bryant McGill
Be the patience you seek
Bryant McGill
The master tools of success are invitation, patience, time, gentleness, cooperation and surrender.
Bryant McGill
You don't always have to teach the the corrective lesson. Sometimes you can teach the lesson of patience and non-engagement.
Bryant McGill