Quotes by Activists - Page 42

Calling for an end to hate shouldn't be treated as a punishable offense.
DaShanne Stokes
What does religious freedom mean if we would use it as a cover for hate and privilege?
DaShanne Stokes
People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility. (p. 81)
James Baldwin
Bigotry that is known and visible is bigotry that can be challenged.
DaShanne Stokes
If you defend free speech for bigots but not to combat bigotry, then you believe in bigotry, not free speech.
DaShanne Stokes
Privilege is when your voice is the norm but still you claim to be unheard.
DaShanne Stokes
Bigots often like to say they're the ones being hurt as they oppress and hurt others. Never fall for the 'pity the privileged' routine.
DaShanne Stokes
Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.
Bryant McGill
I feel that all knowledge should be in the free-trade zone. Your knowledge, my knowledge, everybody's knowledge should be made use of. I think people who refuse to use other people's knowledge are making a big mistake. Those who refuse to share their knowledge with other people are making a great mistake, because we need it all. I don't have any problem about ideas I got from other people. If I find them useful, I'll just ease them right in and make them my own.
Myles Horton
Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
Rebecca Solnit
Intelligent men do not decide any subject until they have carefully examined both or all sides of it. Fools, cowards, and those too lazy to think, accept blindly, without examination, dogmas and doctrines imposed upon them in childhood by their parents, priests, and teachers, when their minds were immature and they could not reason.
James Hervey Johnson
So many of our problems begin when we start worrying what others think of us.
Bryant McGill
You are only plagued with stress in moments of conflict because you are arrogant, and believe others are transgressing by having unfavorable thoughts about you.
Bryant McGill
In the face of every type of pain, we tend to think that life will never be the same, but guess what, it was never going to be the same anyway.
Bryant McGill
Nothing great ever happens from thinking small.
Bryant McGill
You think that if you blame, you will then be free of those problems, but blame cements you to your problems.
Bryant McGill
You have to do some thinking and know who you are, and then you have to resist compromising your truth for the comfort of others.
Bryant McGill
Beware! Success is not what you think it is. It's a trap.
Bryant McGill
If you feel trapped quit thinking about the trap and start thinking about your value. Life favors value. Value is your way out.
Bryant McGill
All of the great mastermind thinkers throughout history have known that we become our thoughts.
Bryant McGill
All problems begin when we start worrying what others think of us.
Bryant McGill
An important step in escaping mediocrity is to stop worrying about what other people think of you.
Bryant McGill
Start thinking of your guilt as being selfish, because guilt blocks opportunities from arriving for those you care about and for you.
Bryant McGill
Negative self-talk and negative affirmation can keep you anchored in old thought patterns and identities.
Bryant McGill
Our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line – to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities – is one of human cognition's most astonishing traits. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close.
Eli Pariser
What you’re thinking is what you’re becoming.
Muhammad Ali
Almost everything a person thinks is a lie, and an assault against the natural soul.
Bryant McGill
Man is a product of nature, a part of the Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws of nature or he perishes.
James Hervey Johnson
Life wants you to know that feelings are more important than facts, and you should never hurt someone just to be right.
Bryant McGill
When you feel lost turn towards love. Become a seeker of beauty in all things.
Bryant McGill
When negative feelings move upon you, reflect, and recognize the danger of feeding those feelings and keeping them alive.
Bryant McGill
Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.
Audre Lorde
Looking back, I realized that we were being raised to be schizophrenic; an appearance of perfection was more important than genuine feelings
Tehmina Durrani
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 fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.
James Baldwin
And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back.
James Baldwin
I'm not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, 'For the same reason I laugh so often--because I'm paying attention.' I tell them that we can choose to be perfect and admired or to be real and loved. We must decide.
Glennon Doyle Melton
You can know something is a lie when it has no love in it.
Bryant McGill
When a man is able to connect with his feelings, he is able to care more.
Warren Farrell
i move on feeling and have learned to distrust those who don't.
Nikki Giovanni
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart
Helen Keller
NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.
Arundhati Roy
Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him that raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she raged against.
Arundhati Roy
Any act of violence creates resentment and resistance, because humans were meant to be free.
Bryant McGill
Let your resistance, judgements, angers and fears inform you.
Bryant McGill
When people conclude that anger causes abuse, they are confusing cause and effect. Ray was not abusive because he was angry; he was angry because he was abusive. Abusers carry attitudes that produce fury.
Lundy Bancroft
When the dark clouds of doubt, anger or worry begin to move upon you, steady yourself in the knowledge that in time, the storm will pass.
Bryant McGill
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
James Baldwin
I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.
Audre Lorde
If we speak of an angry God at all, we will speak of a God angry at indifference, angry at apathy, angry at racism and violence, angry at inhumanity, angry at waste, angry at destruction, angry at injustice, angry at hostile religious clannishness. That anger is never against us (or them); it is against what is against us (and them).
Brian D. McLaren
Anger is good... Anger, you see, is to people what fuel is to an automobile. Without it, we would not be motivated to rise to any challenge, and life would be no more than mere existence. Anger is an energy that compels us to define what is right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust.Anger is also like electricity. Electricity is powerful-- so powerful, in fact, that it can cause devastating destruction if it is mishandled or abused. But if channeled properly and intelligently, it is highly useful to mankind.
Arun Gandhi
Every time you feel great anger, stop and write down who or what caused your feelings and why you reacted so angrily. The goal is to get to the root of the anger. Only when you understand the source can you find a solution.
Arun Gandhi
But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.
Audre Lorde
The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves agains the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger's usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.
Audre Lorde
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
Maya Angelou
Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
A nation lives forever through its concepts, honour, and culture. It is for these reasons that the rulers of nations must judge and act not only on the basis of physical and material interests of the nation but on the basis of the nation's historical honour, of the nation's eternal interests. Thus: not bread at all costs, but honour at all costs.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
We have been trained by a culture of violence and we are all agents of passive violence.
Bryant McGill
We all know there is something wrong with our culture, the state of our world, and with ourselves.
Bryant McGill
The inherent prejudice in unnaturally-produced nationalism causes a form of cultural blindness, which prevents us from seeing the obvious ways we could co-exist in the world as a co-operative human family.
Bryant McGill