Quotes by Activists - Page 45

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
Mahatma Gandhi
You saw me bludgeoned by circumstance.Lost, injured, hurt by chance.I screamed to the heavens....loudly screamed....Trying to change our nightmares into dreams...
Maya Angelou
If I had spoken to him out loud, he would have understood the tragic fate of those who came back, left over, living dead. You must look at them carefully. Their appearance is deceptive. They are smugglers. They look like the others. They eat, they laugh, they love. The seek money, fame, love. Like the other. But it isn't true; they are playing, sometimes without even knowing it. Anyone who has seen what THEY have seen cannot be like the others, cannot laugh, love, pray, bargain, suffer, have fun, or forget. Like the others. You have to watch them carefully when they pass by an innocent-looking smokestack, or when they lift a piece of bread to their mouths. Something in them shudders and makes you turn your eyes away. These people have been amputated; they haven't lost their legs or eyes, but their will and their taste for life. The things they have seen will come to the surface again sooner or later. And then the world will be frightened and won't dare look these spiritual cripples in the eye.
Elie Wiesel
He pondered long over this, for might not another man, returning to another valley, have found none of these things? Why was it given to one man to have his pain transmuted into gladness? Why was it given to one man to have such an awareness of God?
Alan Paton
Glanced up and caught Ammu's gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks , its scars its wouns from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away. In its abscence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain as water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no-one noticed. In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn't seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by histor's blinkers....This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment. Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History's fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
Arundhati Roy
Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.
Helen Keller
There are graceful ways of accessing your purpose and success, with time, invitation, gentleness, cooperation and surrender.
Bryant McGill
Comport yourself with grace under pressure.
Bryant McGill
There are gentler and more graceful ways to interface with natural conflict.
Bryant McGill
The best practice is to be around people who absolutely disagree. Grace in conflict is a study in love.
Bryant McGill
Life-giving ministry flows from lives that are full of gratitude to God, not with an expectation of gratitude from others. In community we can support one another, affirm contributions and yet also trust that our work is sustained by grace.
Christopher L. Heuertz
Jamie was like no one else he had ever met. She had ethics; she had moral integrity. She was clearly not corruptible, at least not for money--that test was over.
Patricia Cori
She knew that her lifework had changed forever that day. She was being called to use her gift to help prevent a tragedy such as this from ever happening again. And she knew, without question, that the whales and dolphins would reach out to her again, from the other side of the night . . . and she would be there.
Patricia Cori
Jamie reflected. She couldn't help but feel there was more to it than what Mat was asking for, and she knew that his purpose for bringing her in had nothing to do with 'saving the ecosystem.' It was a ruse that he knew would resonate with her--she knew it. No, there was something more: something hidden.
Patricia Cori
Yes, indeed. San Francisco was the perfect place for a walker between worlds like Jamie Hastings to grow up in. Her soul had chosen wisely before coming in, born to a visionary mother like Amanda, and situated in one of sunny California's most beautiful landscapes.
Patricia Cori
America, and all it had once stood for--all he had fought for--was dying...on life support, and counting.
Patricia Cori
Not a day went by that he didn't think of that moment of impact, and when he watched, helplessly, as his son died in his arms. For all intents and purposes, he died too. Jeb Richardson sealed his heart that day; he closed his mind. He cursed god, gave up on his dreams, and turned away from love altogether.
Patricia Cori
The thought of that kid pulling a knife on the other, for something as trivial as a stereo, was unconscionable to a simple, peace-loving man like Nathan, who grew up in a time when people still talked to each other . . . when there was still a dialogue going on. Sure, there had always been violence, he didn't deny that, but it was the exception when he was growing up, compared to the new 'normal' of today: this constant threat, all the time, everywhere . . . around every corner. The world was seething now, bubbling over in a cauldron of rage.
Patricia Cori
Unbeknownst to most of its dormant and otherwise distracted inhabitants, one beautiful tiny blue sphere, spinning through the dark cloak of galactic space, was clearly under siege.
Patricia Cori
He was a man's man: an expert on the golf course, a force to be dealt with in business, and a Texan through and through--and proud of it.
Patricia Cori
She was a perfectly clean slate--a total enigma.
Patricia Cori
You are the greatest undiscovered adventure of your lifetime.
Bryant McGill
This very moment is your greatest adventure.
Bryant McGill
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Helen Keller
This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.
Rebecca Solnit
To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
Grace Paley
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of 'Success.
James Baldwin
I don’t know any writers who don’t drink.
James Baldwin
He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear.
James Baldwin
But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
James Baldwin
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
Simone Weil
I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.
Shane Claiborne
I need the money, people are very coy about money, and the ladies arent just coy, they are sci fi about money……people ask, well, dont sweet things happen? yes, indeed, many sweet things, but sweet doesnt keep you from dying, making love doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, writing doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, being wise doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, facts are facts, being poor makes you face facts which also does not keep you from dying.
Andrea Dworkin
Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people.
Bob Torres
Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.
Rebecca Solnit
Pope John Paul II once said as well, “Lebanon is a message more than it is a country.” Now this diversity has turned into fragmentation and the richness into poverty, awaiting a miraculous remedy.
Rami Ollaik
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent
Nelson Mandela
Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have their help, didn't as far as could be discovered, read, either--they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes.
James Baldwin
Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.
Barbara Ehrenreich
There is nothing more sickening than talking about poverty over a fancy dinner.
Shane Claiborne
Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.
Shane Claiborne
The lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like 6 september 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.
Shane Claiborne
If you have a poverty of heart then you are the poorest among the poor.
Bryant McGill
One would never defeat one's circumstances by working and saving one's pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities.
James Baldwin
Success, just like poverty is a state of mind. You can become successful instantly with a simple decision and commitment. Long lasting and pronounced success comes to those who renew their commitment to a mindset of abundance every minute, hour and day.
Bryant McGill
WE MUST ALL EAT OR ELSE WE WILL PUT SAND IN YOUR FOOD.
Job Amupanda
I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it's important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. It's not that somebody shouldn't have specialized knowledge. The ability to dig a trench and lay a cable is a kind of specialized knowledge. Farmers have specialized knowledge, too. The question is: what sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I don't think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and laborers starve.The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty, because their work is not valued. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewage system didn't work? A CEO wouldn't be able to deal with his own shit.
Arundhati Roy
There is little to be said in favour of poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship. Many people will appear to befriend you when you are wealthy, but precious few will do the same when you are poor
Nelson Mandela
The church wanted us to give out food to malnourished children, but they didn't want us to question why they were malnourished to begin with.
Elvia Alvarado
They [the church] wanted us to give food out to malnourished mothers and children, but they didn't want us to question why we were malnourished to begin with. They wanted us to grow vegetables on the tiny plots around our houses, but they didn't want us to question why we didn't have enough land to feed ourselves. [p. 16]
Elvia Alvarado
But apparently you don't need dot-com wealth to ruin an area for its low-income residents. The Pioneer Press quotes Secretary of HUD Andrew Cuomo ruing the "cruel irony" that prosperity is shrinking the stock of affordable housing nationwide: "The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents.
Barbara Ehrenreich
I think of what it means to be a teenager in America, necessarily pushing boundaries, making expected mistakes. Here there is no margin for error: a mistake, no matter how insignificant, dashes any small hopes to break the cycle of poverty. Here in Kibera the world is relentless and unforgiving.
Jessica Posner
We eat junk because it's cheap and it lights up the pleasure centers of our brain. And we do drugs because it's an effective way to feel good or escape something.
Linda Tirado
Poverty without a people's government looks like hopelessness, but to see poverty in organized communities is to see relief-in-progress.
Holly Near
The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.
Frances Moore Lappé
But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitations services and basic education to every person on the planet. And we wonder why terrorists attack us.
John Perkins
And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.
Shane Claiborne
To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
Jane Jacobs