Quotes by Activists - Page 40

I don't believe vegans (or vegetarians) who still get their (packaged, preservative/chemical-ridden) food from industrial food systems have any righteous ground to stand on, nor do I think a deep look at the sentient life of plants or the true environmental impact of agriculture permits them any comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in this world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether running on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you've never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord.
Brian Awehali
Few of us are aware that the act of eating can be a powerful statement of commitment to our own well-being, and at the same time the creation of a healthier habitat. Your health, happiness, and the future of life on earth are rarely so much in your own hands as when you sit down to eat.
John Robbins
We cannot afford to be discouraged from challenging the corporate control of our food system, our genetic commons, our shared resources, or our democracy. The history of social change in our nation shows that the political system can be reformed, even if the road is long and zigzag.
Wenonah Hauter
A robust regional food system that benefits eaters and farmers cannot be achieved in a marketplace that is controlled, top to bottom, by a few firms and that rewards only scale, not innovation, quality, or sustainability.
Wenonah Hauter
Eat beautiful foods, which are nutritionally dense, wholesome and natural.
Bryant McGill
Simple foods connect with your body's needs in complex ways.
Bryant McGill
Love foods that sustain and protect you, and love you back.
Bryant McGill
Inhabitants of urban industrial cultures have no point of contact with grain, chickens, cows, or, for that matter, with topsoil. We have no basis of experience to outweigh the arguments of political vegetarians. We have no idea what plants, animals, or soil eat, or how much. Which means we have no idea what we ourselves are eating.
Lierre Keith
I'm not one of those academics that don't do shit but reads about it. The difference is, I do shit. I have a proof of concept and it works.
Ron Finley
Our food is among the most intimate connections we make with the earth.
Gene Baur
That was when it became abundantly clear to me that simply eating in a way that avoided hurting others was never going to be enough if my eating habits were still hurting me.
Jasmin Singer
There is no place left for the buffalo to roam. There’s only corn, wheat, and soy. About the only animals that escaped the biotic cleansing of the agriculturalists are small animals like mice and rabbits, and billions of them are killed by the harvesting equipment every year. Unless you’re out there with a scythe, don’t forget to add them to the death toll of your vegetarian meal. They count, and they died for your dinner, along with all the animals that have dwindled past the point of genetic feasibility.
Lierre Keith
Cow, goat, chicken, lamb . . . only slaves eat like this,’ Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on to his plate. ‘Our stomachs are graveyards.
Arundhati Roy
Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.
Derrick Jensen
[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.
Arundhati Roy
Almost everything you think is sacred, good and decent, is a lie and an all-out assault against truth and decency.
Bryant McGill
The biggest liar you will ever meet is yourself. It is amazing the lies we tell ourselves because of fear.
Bryant McGill
Freedom is the most sophisticated form of control. The best lies use the truth.
Bryant McGill
If you can't be who you really are then what is life but an unbearable lie?
Bryant McGill
REJECT THE LIES AND VIOLENCE. STAND FOR LOVE, TRUTH, DECENCY AND THE COMMON GOOD.
Bryant McGill
Did you play by the rules and work hard but feel empty and unfulfilled? It's because you were lied to.
Bryant McGill
The acceptable is unacceptable. The truth is a lie. The good is pure evil. Even freedom has become a prison.
Bryant McGill
Adoptees deserve open records because deception and partial truths do not set us free.
DaShanne Stokes
Privilege is when you contribute to the oppression of others and then claim that you are the one being discriminated against.
DaShanne Stokes
Lies sound like facts to those who've been conditioned to mis-recognize the truth.
DaShanne Stokes
Facts are threatening to those invested in fraud.
DaShanne Stokes
If our goal is to be tolerant of people who are different than we are, Chase, then we really are aiming quite low. Traffic jams are to be tolerated. People are to be celebrated.
Glennon Doyle Melton
As I’m beginning to find out, parenting is no child’s play, it couldSometimes determine whether couples continue to live together orgo their separate ways.
Oche Otorkpa
So often parents of abused children feel helpless. When a child falls, and scrapes her knees parents can erase the hurt by kissing it and putting a Band-Aid on it, but not so with the pain of sexual abuse.
Erin Merryn
I felt like I needed to comfort both the little girl inside me and my mother, assuring them that neither of them could have prevented the rape. I didn't want my mother to blame herself and I didn't want to blame the little girl inside of me for not speaking up at the age of six.
Erin Merryn
Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.
Barbara Ehrenreich
It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn't feel, or if he wins.
Audre Lorde
Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.
Audre Lorde
Let’s be Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem, carefully watch their father’s behavior as the house next door to theirs burns to the ground. As the fire creeps closer and closer to the Finches’ home, Atticus appears so calm that Scout and Jem finally decide that “it ain’t time to worry yet.” We need to be Atticus. Hands in our pockets. Calm. Believing. So that our children will look at us and even with a fire raging in front of them, they’ll say, “Huh. Guess it’s not time to worry yet.
Glennon Doyle Melton
My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together— whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.
James Baldwin
If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.
Marian Wright Edelman
We begin to understand that to coparent is to one day look up and notice that you are on a roller coaster with another human being. You are in the same car, strapped down side by side and you can never, ever get off. There will never be another moment in your lives when your hearts don't rise and fall together, when your minds don't race and panic together, when your stomachs don't churn in tandem, when you stop seeing huge hills emerge in the distance and simultaneously grab the side of the car and hold on tight. No one except for the one strapped down beside you will ever understand the particular thrills and terrors of your ride.
Glennon Doyle Melton
I learned to love my son without wanting to possess him and I learned how to teach him to teach himself.
Maya Angelou
I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.
Marian Wright Edelman
That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the old Norse ‘los’ meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places… I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.
Rebecca Solnit
The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?
Maya Angelou
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin
Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.
Bryant McGill
Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.
Audre Lorde
We thought it was nice of you to let him have a go, because, in England, he wouldn't be trusted with a pair of scissors.
Russell Brand
A democracy of mean and ignorant people is just as scary as any other horrible form of government.
Bryant McGill
Deep-rooted beliefs are one of the many consequences of intellect, and also of ignorance; and telling one from the other is sometimes impossible.
Bryant McGill
Ignorance is the supreme oppressor.
Bryant McGill
This is the eternal challenge with ignorance — ignorance can't see itself.
Bryant McGill
Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of women of Color to educated white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.
Audre Lorde
If it’s not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I’m interested in but don’t yet know. It’s when they explain things to me I know and they don’t that the conversation goes awry.
Rebecca Solnit
Our grief is not a cry for war."That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.
Gloria Steinem
It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can see and so one can say, ‘There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty patch.
Andrea Dworkin
Ignorance is a terrible thing. It causes families to lose their center and causes people to lose their control. Ignorance knows no binds. Old people, young people, middle-aged, black, white, can all be ignorant.
Maya Angelou
Racism is dead only to those who've closed their eyes and ears to the whole world around them.
DaShanne Stokes
You are lost because you have not been being honest with yourself, and your life is largely unexamined and unexerted.
Bryant McGill
Everything comes by being! Be the love you seek. Be the friend you seek. Be the lover you seek. Be the honesty you seek. Be the integrity you seek.
Bryant McGill
There is nothing you will ever do that is more important than being honest about who you really are.
Bryant McGill
Witnessing honesty frightens some people because they haven't known authenticity in their own life.
Bryant McGill
What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.
Audre Lorde