Quotes by Activists - Page 41

Real transformation requires real honesty. If you want to move forward — get real with yourself.
Bryant McGill
In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric. He must believe his ends to be served all things and people can justifiably be shifted about, or that he is the center not only of his own world but of the worlds which others inhabit.
Maya Angelou
Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.
Mahatma Gandhi
Impossible is nothing.
Muhammad Ali
You need not strive to become your greater purpose.
Bryant McGill
There is no greater path than the act of listening.
Bryant McGill
There is no greater path than the act of listening, because the observer who listens can begin to see themselves as a part of one expression of purpose and beingness.
Bryant McGill
Don't give-up on your greatest masterpiece — you.
Bryant McGill
Remember that any desire is tested; the greater the desire, the greater the tests.
Bryant McGill
The greatest self is a peaceful smile, that always sees the world smiling back.
Bryant McGill
Every shortcut has a price usually greater than the reward.
Bryant McGill
Source truth exists in greater abundance outside of the symbolic system of words.
Bryant McGill
If you don't believe in God, then the God concept is a great placeholder for everything we don't know, which is exponentially more than we do know.
Bryant McGill
You are likely the greatest obstacle to achieving your own dreams.
Bryant McGill
When you live positively it is impossible to not also be living for something greater than yourself.
Bryant McGill
Hopefully and devoutly focus on your greater possibilities.
Bryant McGill
If you live with values for yourself, then you become of great value to all who know you.
Bryant McGill
If you were really humble you would be great, because humility would never squander the magnificent gift of life.
Bryant McGill
You can only become great at that thing you're willing to sacrifice for.
Maya Angelou
You will be a beautiful person, as long as you see the beauty in others.
Bryant McGill
When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, “Where are your wounds?” and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, “Was there nothing to fight for?” I couldn’t face that question.
Alan Paton
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched- they must be felt with the heart.
Helen Keller
She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims...
Arundhati Roy
The offspring of nationalist thinking too often expresses itself in exclusionary and passively-violent legal policies, and then sadly, through militarism, which becomes manifest on the endless blood-soaked borders and battlefields of humanity's great failure as a humane species.
Bryant McGill
We huddle tightly together as cowards, protecting the ranks of our false collective identity from "less-human" intruders, when the only obvious and sane truth is that we are all the same human beings.
Bryant McGill
Though no longer living in silence, I continued to carry pain and memories.
Erin Merryn
But as I began to write this book, I realised that without the whole truth my life would have no power, no real meaning. With the help of my mother, the memories of our lives in North Korea and China cane back to me like scenes from a forgotten nightmare. Some of the images reappeared with a terrible clarity; others were hazy, or scrambled like a deck of cards spilled on the floor. The process of writing has been the process of remembering, and of trying to make sense out of those memories.
Yeonmi Park
Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.
Arundhati Roy
I understand that sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.
Yeonmi Park
When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and texture and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappearing from around the organs and detaching iself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency leaving a gleaming skeleton gleaming like ivory that slowly resolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight the way your flesh occupies momentary space the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.
David Wojnarowicz
Innocence still lives within our hearts and the child within each of us knows right from wrong.
Bryant McGill
The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had been morally conquered by the enemy.
David McReynolds
The primary reason more explicit material is now being published is twofold: there's money in the sale of sensational material, and few are trying to stop those who want to make this money, that is, unscrupulous publishers.
Linda Harvey
There is no enemy that respect and love will not conquer. The moral authority for survival comes from respect.
Bryant McGill
Companies' motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values.
Russell Brand
If God creates morality, then morality is nothing more than the whimsy of a divine being blindly followed by humans.
Armin Navabi
In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces. Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.
Barbara Ehrenreich
That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That's how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwise you can't be sure if you're safe.
James Baldwin
It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American
Naomi Wolf
True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path for ourselves, and fearlessly following it.
Mahatma Gandhi
Fearlessness is the first requisite of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral.
Mahatma Gandhi
Love gives without expectation, while hate carries an endless tally of debts.
Bryant McGill
Love only serves and does not calculate. Love gives without expectation, while hate carries an endless tally of debts. Hate controls everything it touches, but love sets everything it touches free.
Bryant McGill
In a world of hate, love is the revolution.
Bryant McGill
A mn ages hs enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: I hate him not because he's my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.
Elie Wiesel
True enemies aren't always the ones who hate each other.
Elie Wiesel
Love always was and always will be the only real answer. Why else do you think we have been taught so much hate?
Bryant McGill
Your love for beauty has been perverted, repressed and savaged by hateful and controlling elements in the world.
Bryant McGill
Anyone who hates anyone, only hates themselves.
Bryant McGill
It’s gotten far easier to allow ourselves to hate than it is to choose to love.
Sam Killermann
The world is getting too small for both an Us and a Them. Us and Them have become codependent, intertwined, fixed to one another. We have no separate fates, but are bound together in one. And our fear of one another is the only thing capable of our undoing.
Sam Killermann
She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.
Barbara Ehrenreich
hate generalizes, love specifies
Gloria Steinem
Self-governance does not mean no one is responsible. It means everyone is.
Heather Marsh
It's terrifying to think you could become the next statistic.
DaShanne Stokes
If you love your country, you must be willing to defend it from fraud, bigotry, and recklessness--even from a president.
DaShanne Stokes
Trump didn't divide America. He just doused us with gasoline and fanned the flames.
DaShanne Stokes
Building bridges takes us further than building walls.
DaShanne Stokes
It's a scary world we live in when a person of color endorses a racist for president.
DaShanne Stokes
Discrimination is discrimination, even when people claim it's 'tradition.
DaShanne Stokes