Quotes by Activists - Page 38

The Atheist waits for proof of God. Till that proof comes he remains, as his name implies, without God. His mind is open to every new truth, after it has passed the warder Reason at the gate.
Annie Besant
You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [....] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I'll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive.And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our attitudes and our habits. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world. Only in people who are severely traumatized or who have major mental illnesses is behavior governed by feelings. And only a tiny percentage of abusive men have these kinds of severe psychological problems.
Lundy Bancroft
All defensiveness and emotional tumult is a fear response because of your need for acceptance and ruthless control of the territory of your safe fantasy world.
Bryant McGill
Quit pretending to be humble when you are really just a self-abusing, emotional, drama junkie.
Bryant McGill
When we can't let go of the past, painful moments accumulate in us; metastasizing in our consciousness like an emotional cancer.
Bryant McGill
The coolness of Buddhism isn't indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as whole, see all the islands and the routes between them. Up close it all dissolves into texture and incoherence and immersion, like a face going out of focus just before a kiss.
Rebecca Solnit
Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!” Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.
Marge Piercy
Even within perfection, there are flaws. These flaws carry an unattainable beauty, which is indifferent to the human nature.
Nocturnus Libertus
Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.
Arundhati Roy
You know what kind of a man Lonny Tooker is? The kind of a man that sets broken bird's wings.""Hitler loved dogs and babies," Dave said.
Joseph Hansen
When people run out of probable things to do, they do improbable things.
Joseph Hansen
People are like a pack of dogs sometimes. All right one by one, but together... together they do awful things they don't mean to do.
Monica Furlong
As long as humans feel they are forced to defend their own rights and worth by placing someone beneath them, oppression will not end.
Marjorie Spiegel
So everybody lives the way they're told to.The way they have to. Everybody most of the time. Not ever all the time. Hair style, clothing, manner of speech, ideas, cars, houses, and everything. Just like they have to. Even the way we walk. But not all the time. Comes a time when everybody breaks out. And that's the only characteristic of human nature I know of. Not greed, not obedience, not violence, nor any of those things the capitalists would have us believe are intrinsic. Only rebellion.
Helen Potrebenko
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
Simone Weil
.Ensuring that young people get the right information that will enable them make the right choices is a responsibility all citizens must take seriously
Oche Otorkpa
Choosing beauty and love does not mean being uninformed or weak; it means you clearly see the ugliness, but choose love anyway.
Bryant McGill
We each project to others a reflection of the world which includes our choices of perception.
Bryant McGill
By choosing to have a calm response to what seems negative you bring clarity and balance to your message.
Bryant McGill
Tremendously meaningful outreach begins with how you choose to see the world.
Bryant McGill
It is easy to know your purpose in life, because you choose your purpose in life.
Bryant McGill
Opportunity will only meet you in the domain of your chosen attitude.
Bryant McGill
You can choose better relationships, better jobs, better places to live, better uses of your time and better ways of treating yourself.
Bryant McGill
Who you are is why you choose poorly, or fail to choose wisely.
Bryant McGill
Once you choose to love yourself then everything else will be perfect.
Bryant McGill
You should never have a relationship based on guilt over someone's poor choices.
Bryant McGill
Always choose to trust yourself and your ability to listen.
Bryant McGill
Freedom only exists in the choice. When you don't have the choice you are not free.
Bryant McGill
Who you are is why you choose the friends and situations in your life.
Bryant McGill
We do not have control over what happens to us in life, but we do have control over how we chose to respond.
Bryant McGill
Choose to be pro-active, assertive and self-defining.
Bryant McGill
By choosing positivity you become a contender for the human spirit giving hope to those in need.
Bryant McGill
The purpose of your life is the purpose you bring to it choice by choice and recognition by recognition.
Bryant McGill
Sometimes doing what's right for your conscience is not always the most popular decision, but I can guarantee that in retrospect you won't regret the choice you made.
Tyler Oakley
You are creating through your choices, even now. Choose wisely.
Bryant McGill
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
James Baldwin
After all, hope is a form of planning.
Gloria Steinem
It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.
Gloria Steinem
I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.
Gloria Steinem
Every journey begins with the first step of articulating the intention, and then becoming the intention.
Bryant McGill
Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.
Maya Angelou
A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.
Rebecca Solnit
In response to my question about how we might rein in the empire, he said, "That's why I'm meeting with you. Only you in the United States can change it. Your government created this problem and your people must solve it. You've got to insist that Washington honor its commitment to democracy, even when deomcratically elected leaders nationalize your corrupting corporations. You must take control of your corporations and your government. The people of the United States have a great deal of power. You need to come to grips with this. There's no alternative. We in Brazil have our hands tied. So do the Venezeulans. And the Nigerians. It's up to you.
John Perkins
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Cory Doctorow
The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.
Julian Assange
But so long as I lived under a system of Government based on force and voluntarily partook of the many facilities and privileges it created for me, I was bound to help that Government to the extent of my ability when it was engaged in a war, unless I non-co-operated with the Government and renounced to the utmost of my capacity the privileges it offered me.
Mahatma Gandhi
My politics is my religion, my religion is my politics.
Mahatma Gandhi
America is a nation of illusions; illusions in the media, schools and government — an iron curtain of propaganda.
Bryant McGill
When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. Dom Helder Camara – one of the great prophets of Christian "Liberation theology".
Dom Helder Camara Archbishop of Recife in Brazil
Any Federal official, who engages in employment discrimination, lacks the moral integrity to evenhandedly enforce our Nation’s laws or manage Federal programs.
Tanya Ward Jordan
In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance.
Gloria Steinem
If we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone, not just individuals but governments as well.
Helen Prejean
My father once told me that American democracy is a people’s democracy at heart, and that it therefore can be as great as the American people, or as fallible. It depends on all of us. But our system is more fragile than we know. To sustain it, we must always cherish the ideals on which it was founded, remain vigilant against the dark forces that threaten it, and actively engage in the process of making it work.
George Takei
Go to any airport in this country and you’ll see how well our government is dealing with the terrible danger you’re in. TSA staffers are wanding 90-year-old ladies in wheelchairs, and burrowing through their suitcases. Toddlers are on the no-fly list. Lipsticks are confiscated. And it’s all done with the highest seriousness. It’s a show of protection and it stirs the fear pot, giving us over and over an image of being in grave personal peril, needing Big Brother to make sure we’re safe.
Ann Medlock
It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.
Naomi Klein
Drugs is a government game, Bilal. A way to rob us of our best black men, our army. Everyone who plays the game loses. Then they get you right back where we started, in slavery! Then they get to say "This time you did it to yourself." I won't play that game.
Sister Souljah
I can retain neither respect nor affection for government which has been moving from wrong to wrong in order to defend its immorality
Mahatma Gandhi
It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman — and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze — as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter — one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process — sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock — demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution.
Gloria Steinem