Quotes by Activists - Page 35

I recognize that I have the ability to be selfish, but I also recognize that you can't be happy if you only care about yourself at the expense of other people.
Russell Brand
Just be happy and if you can't be happy, do things that make you happy. or do nothing with the people that make you happy.
Esther Grace Earl
We must reject the artificial and embrace what is real and true: truth in food, community, relationships and self.
Bryant McGill
Stop being so greedy, and so selfish. Realize that there is more to the world than your big houses and fancy stores. People are starving and you worry about oil for your cars. Babies are dying of thirst and you search the fashion pages for the latest styles. Nations like ours are drowing in poverty, but your people don't even hear our cries for help. You shut your ears to the voices of those who try to tell you these things. You label them radicals or Communists. You must open your hearts to the poor and downtrodden, instead of driving them further into poverty and servitude. There's not much time left. If you don't change, you're doomed.
John Perkins
Imagine the message that sent to my sister and me. A cousin violates us, confesses, and walks away with barely a slap on the wrist. I learned at a young age that if I was ever going to see justice for the wrongs done to me, I had to find it myself.
Erin Merryn
By opening the door to my life, it is my hope and mission to shed light on the hidden wounds of abuse, to end the stigma and shame associated with abuse, and to show survivors true courage, strength, inspiration, and determination.
Erin Merryn
You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you're not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that's going on. Try to make yourself aware of what's happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.
Bill Ayers
By constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world.
Eli Pariser
A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer.
Derrick Jensen
The more spiritually aware you become the more you will focus on your own self and less on others.
Bryant McGill
A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer.Three or four nights later I had a dream. I was driving. To my right I sawbaby cranes — blue-green, all legs, beak, and wings — standing in a field. They took off and crashed, took off and crashed. I stopped the car and got out. "That looks like it hurts. Why do you do it?" One of the cranes looked me square in the eye. "We may not fly very well yet, but at least we aren't walking."I awoke, happy. From that moment, there has been no turning back.
Derrick Jensen
Remaining aware of awareness, witnessing it thru every experience within without one, is the way and the goal both...Be Happy and keep smiling...
Satish Kumar
The practice of deep listening is the practice of open inquiry, without assumption or judgement.
Sharon Weil
Be present in all things and thankful for all things.
Maya Angelou
In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.
Rebecca Solnit
I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.
Rebecca Solnit
It is to the prodigals...that the memory of their Father's house comes back. If the son had lived economically he would never have thought of returning.
Simone Weil
He wanted me to come home--to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.
James Baldwin
As far back as I can remember, there has always been a place to which I belonged with a certainty that nothing has been able to take from me. When I say place, that means less a geographical locality and more a group of people with whom I am connected and to whom I belong.
Sindiwe Magona
...one can never leave home...one carries the shadows, the dreams, the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes...
Maya Angelou
Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors, are mysterious apparitions, who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen.[…]We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.
Maya Angelou
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
James Baldwin
I know this world is far from perfect.I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.But every ocean has a shorelineand every shoreline has a tidethat is constantly returningto wake the songbirds in our hands,to wake the music in our bones,to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that new born riverthat has to run through the center of our heartsto find its way home.
Andrea Gibson
The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou
I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.
Maya Angelou
Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Healthy ChoicesHold stillKeep quiet.Get a degree to learn how to talksaying nothing.Catch a good manby being demure.the one your mother chooses.Let him climb youwhenever his urge,amidst headachesand menstrual achesand screaming infants.And when he bidsquick, turn over.Hold still.Make your tonguea slab of cementa white stone etchedwith your name.Kill your stories with knivesand knitting needlesand Clorox bleach.Hide in your mysteriousnessby saying nothing.Starch your thoughtswith ironed shirts.Tie your angerwith a knot inyour throatand when he comeswithout concernswallow it.Hold still.Keep desirehopeless as iceand sleepless nightsand painful as pinched eyelid.Keep your fingersfrom the razor,keep your longingto severhis condescensionsafely in your douchbag.Turn the bladeagainst yourself.Don't twitchas your slashed wristsstain your bathroom tiles.Disinfect with Pine Sol.Hold still. Keep quiet.Keep tight your lips,keep dead your dreams,keep cold your heart.Keep quiet.And he will shoutpraisesto yourperfection.
Janice Mirikitani
Touch Me, but not with your hands.
Orville Lloyd Douglas
and everybody was happy that uncle lee was able to get that scholarship even though you wondered when you could do quadratic equations in your head why you had a basketball scholarship but you always knew that you had to take what they were giving since that was all you were going to get but you never fooled yourself about either the taking or the giving or the needing or the having you just sort of said to yourself I'll have to see what is being offered
Nikki Giovanni
The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.
Nikki Giovanni
Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Take the blinders from your visiontake the padding from your earsand confess you've heard me crying and admit you've seen my tears.
Maya Angelou
Nature is the supreme cradle of life, and must be protected and treated with the highest respect and care.
Bryant McGill
It is easier to be angry. It is easier to hate. It is easier to knock someone down. Those are surface level emotions. It is much harder to be tolerant, to seek wisdom and understand, to stop and evaluate your response even can be pretty challenging. Hate is born of ignorance. We are so distracted that living with any depth is such an oversight as a society. We must learn to love and to stop and think. All of which spending time in meditation with the word of God gives us. But who has time for that?
Frances Muenzner Titus
Socrates asked the key question: why should we be moral?
Arundhati Roy
All success comes through other people.
Bryant McGill
A true Brahmachari will not even dream of satisfying the fleshly appetite
Mahatma Gandhi
People always want to define you by what you do. I started saying: ‘i am not too concerned with what i’m going to do. I am more interested in who i am becoming. I want to be a lover of God and people.
Shane Claiborne
The self is...a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on.
Rebecca Solnit
Empowerment comes from self-realization and recognition of our internal gifts, which we already have.
Bryant McGill
Any self-realized being has access to the dynamic genius which nature gives all beings.
Bryant McGill
The self-realized spirit is merely a spirit emancipated from fear, judgement and knowing.
Bryant McGill
Truthis like a vast tree, which yields more and more fruit, the more you nurture it
Mahatma Gandhi
We must become reacquainted with our true human selves.
Bryant McGill
Each moment has an unrealized dimension of beauty that only your perspective can liberate.
Bryant McGill
We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.
Rebecca Solnit
The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.
Maya Angelou
Often it isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the little pebble in your shoe.
Muhammad Ali
Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, ‘inhale great draughts of space,’ wonder, wonder at the wind’s unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the tactual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can the world be shriveled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of sight and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human hands…
Helen Keller
When the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle! The stock of my young life which had perished, steeped in the waters of knowledge grew again, budded again, was sweet again with the blossoms of childhood. Down in the depths of my being, I cried, ‘it is good to be alive!’ I held out two trembling hands to life, and in vain silence would impose dumbness upon me henceforth! The world to which I awoke was still mysterious; but there was hope and love and God in it, and nothing else mattered. Is it not possible that our entrance into heaven may be like this experience of mine?
Helen Keller
I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.
Audre Lorde
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope or confidence.
Helen Keller
From Jeff Greenfield: "I once asked Elie Wiesel "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" "An optimist," he said. "I have to be.
Elie Wiesel
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.
James Baldwin
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
Ellen Willis
Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.
Helen Keller
Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own.Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis...In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch.Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story.
Rebecca Solnit
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.
Rebecca Solnit
The single thing all women need in the world is inspiration, and inspiration comes from storytelling.
Zainab Salbi
The universe is made of stories, not atoms!
Muriel Rukeyser