Quotes by Activists - Page 43

I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles.
David Wojnarowicz
I spent the beginning of my focus on activism by doing what most everyone else was doing; blaming other people and institutions. Don’t like the war? Let’s blame the president, congress, or lobbyists. Don’t like ecological disregard? Let’s blame this or that corrupt corporation or some regulatory body for poor performance. Don’t like being poor and socially immobile? Let’s blame government coercion and interference in this free market utopia everyone keeps talking about.The sobering truth of the matter is that the only thing to blame is the dynamic, causal unfolding of system expression itself on the cultural level. In other words, none of us create or do anything in isolation – it’s impossible. We are system-bound both physically and psychologically; a continuum. Therefore our view of causality with respect to societal change can only be truly productive if we seek and source the most relevant sociological influences we can and begin to alter those effects from the root causes.
Peter Joseph
In a stress pressure-cooker like America, I believe we will see more and more shooting massacres. Violence is in our cultural DNA.
Bryant McGill
The starting point to freedom is to begin questioning the cultural narrative you have been sold.
Bryant McGill
In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every person that's walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in it's place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists-the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings.
Arundhati Roy
Support what is good and spit out what is bad. Get off of your knees and reject the role of slave to the culture of violence.
Bryant McGill
As I learned more about choice, and looked over the extensive evidence in all of the cases I had testified in, I realized that what was happening in the FLDS was human trafficking-both for labor and for sex. In mainstream society, money and lust are the currency. In the FLDS, salvation and position are the currency, but the forced acts of labor and sex are the same-the very definition of slavery. And whether greed or God is the currency, it is not right to own another's free agency.
Rebecca Musser
With the evolution of Us came the evolution of Them.The original Them was anyone who wasn’t blood related — Them was pretty much everyone. Over time, as the number of people in Us got bigger, Them got smaller. Them now might mean anyone in any other country. This is a common Them in America, and a Them that only (light use of this word) consists of 95% of the world. Another common Them in America is anyone who isn’t Christian, which is a measly 68% of the world, or roughly 4.8 Billion Thems.In a relatively short amount of time, Us went from being a fraction of a percent of humanity and Them the rest, to some people experiencing an Us of more than two billion other people, far more than were ever alive at the onset of Us and Them.
Sam Killermann
I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown of my feet by any.
Mahatma Gandhi
I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown of my feet by any
Mahatma Gandhi
If you can't see past my name, you can't see me.
DaShanne Stokes
In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity.
Maya Angelou
All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.
Kalle Lasn
To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them.At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?
Derrick Jensen
The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence.
Julian Assange
Within you, you will find everything you need to be complete.
Bryant McGill
When we do not know our true identity as powerful creators, we are susceptible to being used and manipulated.
Bryant McGill
In judging our progress as individual we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education. These are, of course, important in measuring one's success in material matters and it is perfectly understandable if many people exert themselves mainly to achieve all these. But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others - qualites which are within reach of every soul - are the foundation of one's spiritual life.
Nelson Mandela
Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't.
DaShanne Stokes
Bigotry hurts the economy, so the next time you want to blame minorities for your problems, first take a look in the mirror.
DaShanne Stokes
Saying it's hard being straight is like complaining to the poor that it's difficult being wealthy.
DaShanne Stokes
Persecution complexes are reaffirming to those who benefit from unearned privileges.
DaShanne Stokes
If you think being straight means you're being discriminated against, you're probably misreading your privilege.
DaShanne Stokes
The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts.
Bryant McGill
Elisha,' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember - please remember - I was saved. I was there.
James Baldwin
Believe. No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted island, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
Helen Keller
If you truly pour your heart into what you believe in, even if it makes you vulnerable, amazing things can and will happen.
Emma Watson
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
James Baldwin
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.This means the when you go to sleep you close your eyes and you are and look like you are dead but then when you wake up it looks like you are reborn because you are up and ready.
Mahatma Gandhi
A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.
Audre Lorde
In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
. . . to my surprise I began to know what The Language was about, not just the part we were singing now but the whole poem. It began with the praise and joy in all creation, copying the voice of the wind and the sea. It described sun and moon, stars and clouds, birth and death, winter and spring, the essence of fish, bird, animal, and man. It spoke in what seemed to be the language of each creature. . . . It spoke of well, spring, and stream, of the seed that comes from the loins of a male creature and of the embryo that grows in the womb of the female. It pictured the dry seed deep in the dark earth, feeling the rain and the warmth seeping down to it. It sang of the green shoot and of the tawny heads of harvest grain standing out in the field under the great moon. It described the chrysalis that turns into a golden butterfly, the eggs that break to let out the fluffy bird life within, the birth pangs of woman and of beast. It went on to speak of the dark ferocity of the creatures that pounce upon their prey and plunge their teeth into it--it spoke in the muffled voice of bear and wolf--it sang the song of the great hawks and eagles and owls until their wild faces seemed to be staring into mine, and I knew myself as wild as they. It sang the minor chords of pain and sickness, of injury and old age; for a few moments I felt I was an old woman with age heavy upon me.
Monica Furlong
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.
Nelson Mandela
The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.
John Sinclair
The language of nature is silence.
Bryant McGill
the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
Rebecca Solnit
Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.
Maya Angelou
We thought speaking in English meant you were more intelligent. We were wrong of course. It does not matter what language you choose, the important thing is the words you use to express yourself.
Malala Yousafzai
Language is where the tongue fails itself over & over again.
Christopher Soto
If you'd combat bigotry, use honest language and call things out for what they really are.
DaShanne Stokes
I'm a writer to the bone. I love this language you and I read, write and speak. It's called English. And I'm seriously doubting that it's known to some of the unseen people who write the news.
Ann Medlock
To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.
Rebecca Solnit
How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.
Rebecca Solnit
My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.
Grace Paley
Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
Rebecca Solnit
A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
Simone Weil
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.
Nelson Mandela
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
Nelson Mandela
I’m much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don’t work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it.
Myles Horton
Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
You will find beauty in every person and experience if beauty has been cultivated within.
Bryant McGill
As sensory experience junkies, we have been blinded to the majesty in the common.
Bryant McGill
Neither Peter in his work to include Gentiles in the church nor the abolitionists in their campaign against slavery argued that their experience should take precedence over Scripture. But they both made the case that their experience should cause Christians to reconsider long-held interpretations of Scripture. Today, we are still responsible for testing our beliefs in light of their outcomes—a duty in line with Jesus's teaching about trees and their fruit.
Matthew Vines
The world is full of alluring, flashy and thrilling experiences, which are illusionary traps — they are paths to nowhere.
Bryant McGill
The potential of your life experience shrinks or expands according to your ability to love.
Bryant McGill
Your complete intelligence is designed to experience the fullness of life, not a narrow omission of its best possibilities.
Bryant McGill
Every experience is seen through your mind's eye, so when you change your mind you change your entire world.
Bryant McGill
Look in your disappointments for the resolve to transform your experiences into solutions.
Bryant McGill
I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Audre Lorde
I'm told by my young friends that experience is much more important than books. Of course Ben Franklin had something to say about experience and fools, but even Franklin thought that a fool would learn by his experience. That has proven false in the modern world. Some people are simply unwilling to learn under any circumstances, which maybe, even then, wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so damned proud of it.
Nikki Giovanni