Quotes by Activists - Page 32

Your dream is only possible through a clear intention and patience.
Bryant McGill
Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
Rebecca Solnit
Solitude is a catalyst for innovation
Mahatma Gandhi
This isn't about keeping mountains looking pretty. Ending mountaintop removal is about keeping humanity alive.
Rivera Sun
The Earth was singing her revolution. She was calling her brave men and women to her defense.
Rivera Sun
We depend on this planet to eat, drink, breathe, and live. Figuring out how to keep our life support system running needs to be our number-one priority. Nothing is more important than finding a way to live together - justly, respectfully, sustainably, joyfully - on the only planet we can call home.
Annie Leonard
What she showed me was, Yes, I am Grandmother as she is; there is no separation, really, between us. And that, on this planet, Grandmother Earth, there is no higher authority. That our inseparability is why the planet will be steered to safety by Grandmother/Grandmothers or it will not be steered to safety at all.
Alice Walker
All life on earth is inextricably bound together in a web of mutual interdependence.
Marjorie Spiegel
Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman’s life…
Arundhati Roy
May you receive the wisdom of your wounds and may you live your life even larger than your pain.
Bryant McGill
Pain is the clarion of aliveness trumpeting that you are living in the marvelous tender cause of life!
Bryant McGill
In the marathon of life negativity is never as light-footed as a dreamer's sprint.
Bryant McGill
You don't need to change everything in your life instantly. All you need is one positive thought.
Bryant McGill
One positive thought is the victory you need today!
Bryant McGill
A freedom given up is not so easily regained.
Rivera Sun
I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.
James Baldwin
The reason America is in its death-throes is because America has lost moral authority.
Bryant McGill
The fish does not know it is wet. America is immersed in violence. The violence is in our souls. The enemy is within.
Bryant McGill
America has a unique type of slavery that looks like freedom.
Bryant McGill
The breakdown of mummies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle...For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was the rejection of these roles that had drawn us to 'the life' in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.But those lesbians who had carved some niche in the pretend world of dominance/subordination rejected what they called our 'confused' lifestyle, and they were in the majority.
Audre Lorde
When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people.
Arundhati Roy
We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe.When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each others' throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.
Arundhati Roy
The policies the US government is following are dangerous for its citizens. It's true that you can bomb or buy out anybody that you want to, but you can't control the rage that's building in the world. You just can't. And that rage will express itself in some way or the other. Condemning violence when a section of your economy is based on selling weapons and making bombs and piling up chemical and biological weapons? When the soul of your culture worships violence? On what grounds are you going to condemn terrorism, unless you change your attitude toward violence?
Arundhati Roy
Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it. And even then your experience is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and of course, the fact that I have the option to leave. I am allowed to see the ocean.
Rachel Corrie
I’m dying twice as fastas any other Americanbetween eighteen and thirty-fiveThis disturbs me,but I try not to show it in public.
Essex Hemphill
I bout a bag of tortilla chips that was almost as big as me. And I bought some work clothes and a pair of Adidas that I could never imagine affording before in my life.So far, America was very impressive.
Yeonmi Park
An institution rooted in slavery cannot be the voice of our people.
DaShanne Stokes
[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simplicity, it occurs to me, it has occurred to me more than once, in my somewhat stormy life, simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue, along with sincerity. And the result of this is, if you are simple-minded enough, you can become—I didn’t want to go that far [laughs]. And as long as you’re sincere in what you say, you haven’t got to know what you’re talking about. These are the American virtues—two of them anyway. One of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue too.
James Baldwin
America is a place of opportunity. It’s people-friendly! Very much so, compared to the Muslim countries in the world. People looking for better lives flock to America because we as a society do not mutilate young girls' genitals, do not cut off people’s hands for stealing. We do not stone people to death for committing adultery. We do not rape women and men for speaking up against our government. We do not forbid people to go to school and to learn because of their gender. We assume people are innocent until proven guilty. We give people the freedom to criticize our government and even burn our flag as an expression of speech. This is but a partial list of why America is superior in culture and values to many other countries in the world. This type of culture also thrives in Israel, the only Western-style nation in the Middle East, one that Arabs despise, feel threatened by, and vow to destroy.
Brigitte Gabriel
The Declaration of Independence says that ‘all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’Raised within the Judeo-Christian value system, we are taught from childhood ‘Do not judge others lest you be judged,’ ‘Do unto others what you want others to do unto you,’ and ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.’ We in America have taken this a little further and have become deaf to evil, blind to evil, and incapable of speaking out against evil because as long as it does not affect us, it is none of our business. The Declaration of Independence says that ‘all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ We the people are entitled to equal rights under the law and should have the same opportunity to pursue our dreams, whatever those dreams may be; but it is not said anywhere that we as people are created equal in the material or societal and cultural sense by our creator. Societies and cultures are not created and do not develop equally. This harsh judgment may make you wince. It is not politically correct to say that our Western societies are better than the Muslim Arab societies, but we are, we have been, and we always will be, not because of our wealth but because of the way we think and live, and the values we hold dear and pass on to our future generations. It infuriates me to hear self-loathing Americans, who have never experienced life in an oppressive culture or under an oppressive leadership such as is found in the Middle East, badmouth and put down our culture, government, and country in general. They find all sorts of things wrong with America and think it is insulting to non-Americans to acknowledge that our Western culture is in any way better than others. They are so concerned about hurting ‘feelings,’ and nobody wants to be accused of being a holier-than-thou type. They should get out and see the world and how Arab Muslim leaders are really messing up other people’s lives and getting away with it. Just as it’s time to hold people accountable for their actions, it’s time to hold societies and cultures accountable for theirs also. It is by not judging others that you end up with evil people like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and suicide bombers driven by the ideology that you are worthless infidels who should be killed as Allah ordered
Brigitte Gabriel
When you don’t stop evil in its tracks when you first recognize it, you will end up with a monster force that will spread its tentacles and affect the lives of millions. Because we did not want to judge evildoers such as the Palestinians bombing innocent Israelis, the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein gassing his own people, we have helped create the monsters we are dealing with today. Don’t be afraid to stand up and lift your head and be proud of what America and Western culture stand for. America did not pull itself out of the grip of tyranny and feudalism for nothing. America as a Western culture and as a nation is a tribute to men and women and God’s creation at its best.
Brigitte Gabriel
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.
James Baldwin
I want to keep living in this beautiful dream-world of ours.
David Dennis
Many rabble-rousers for libertarianism, liberty and freedom are unwitting pawns of controllers they have never even considered.
Bryant McGill
Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.
Jonathan Rauch
Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.
Naomi Wolf
The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders … I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one’s right to privacy.
Harry Leslie Smith
And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.
Maya Angelou
Adoption isn't just a childhood experience, it's a life-long experience.
DaShanne Stokes
Hopeful visions touch possibilities that only exist in the gaze of the faithful.
Bryant McGill
Let your existence be enough for a moment.
Bryant McGill
Rest your mind for a moment in the peace of knowing you were created and you do exist.
Bryant McGill
Life is always speaking to us at every moment.
Bryant McGill
Oh, how we could blossom if we didn't have to fight to the death to merely exist!
Bryant McGill
Conflict is a natural part of existence. Life is a struggle for survival for every organism at every level.
Bryant McGill
The system is like a vampire where you must give it permission to enter through your obedience.
Bryant McGill
Pain is a horribly wonderful gift.
Bryant McGill
Open the bloom of your heart and become a gift of beauty to the world.
Bryant McGill
The gift is you.
John Denver
Limitations can be reasonably expanded. We are constantly challenging our limitations. But a hobbled mind is not going anywhere.
Bryant McGill
There is nothing 'honorable' or 'reasonable' in giving a pass to those who want to discriminate.
DaShanne Stokes
You are free. Your mind belongs to you. Your thoughts are yours. Honor the sacred territory of your freedom and individuality.
Bryant McGill
Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.
Barbara Ehrenreich
It was not lack of ability that limited my people, but lack of opportunity.
Nelson Mandela
Everything that has ever happened to me that has been important has not been something that I've hoped for, or looked for, or manipulated -- it's all been predicated on my ability to take a new road when it presented itself and to go wit
Susan Sarandon
What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are its magnificence.
Jane Jacobs
The very "least" among us has the enormous power to effect change through small acts of determination and will.
Bryant McGill
Beyond the clumsy, brute force tools of will, determination and hard work — and free from the heavy attachment of want, and the illusions of burden and blocks, is the true technology of creation through beingness.
Bryant McGill
Love only serves and does not calculate.
Bryant McGill
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.
Cory Doctorow