Quotes by Activists - Page 51

Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.
Harsha Walia
If you find holes in my book that you could drive a car through, do not be too sure they were not left there for that express purpose.
Mary Austin
No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.
Rebecca Solnit
...I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...
Rebecca Solnit
Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.
Rebecca Solnit
Even before you've gone anywhere, you feel like you've gone somewhere
Deborah Ellis
Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.
Gloria Steinem
Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.
Gloria Steinem
Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.
Gloria Steinem
I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.
Gloria Steinem
Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story. Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there…
Rebecca Solnit
I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.
Rebecca Solnit
I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.
Gloria Steinem
If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
James Baldwin
I can go on the road - and I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued int he presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.
Gloria Steinem
I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.
Gloria Steinem
A journey - whether it's to the corner grocery or through life - is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It's the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road - combined with our search for meaning - that make travel so addictive.
Gloria Steinem
Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.
Rebecca Solnit
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.“Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
Rebecca Solnit
One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.
Rebecca Solnit
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Maya Angelou
A mistake made by many people with great convictions is that they will let nothing stand in the way of their views, not even kindness.
Bryant McGill
Seek goodness and be goodness. Seek beauty and be beauty. Seek love and be love
Bryant McGill
Kindness is seen as weakness and intelligence worshiped, even when that intelligence allows unfathomable injustice and suffering to occur under its smart watch.
Bryant McGill
We must be kind and gentle gardeners with people and nature.
Bryant McGill
If you can be kind to people, you will be a genius in this world.
Bryant McGill
Let your brilliance be expressed through kindness.
Bryant McGill
We must each achieve greater individual consciousness and self-knowledge, and project mindful kindness toward everything and everyone.
Bryant McGill
Kindness is the supreme intelligence.
Bryant McGill
Life has a way of shining on people who stand in the sunshine of kind actions.
Bryant McGill
There is no greater intelligence than kindness and empathy.
Bryant McGill
Certainly I believe that God gave us life for happiness, not misery. Humanity, I am sure, will never be made lazy or indifferent by an excess of happiness. Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. Happiness should be a means of accomplishment, like health, not an end in itself.
Helen Keller
Make no mistake about it, no matter how kind, meek, humble and soft your giving heart is — you are a warrior!
Bryant McGill
Be intelligent, but know it is better to be kind than smart.
Bryant McGill
There is a way to flow and cooperate with universal laws which can be beautiful and kind.
Bryant McGill
By being beautiful and kind you are given favored status and opportunity in life.
Bryant McGill
Live with kindness, integrity and spirituality. Comport yourself with grace under pressure.
Bryant McGill
The most effective form of activism is kindness.
Bryant McGill
If you want a great life try being kind.
Bryant McGill
Kindness always works with the most important person — YOU. Be kind for you, not others.
Bryant McGill
In today's world simple kindness is a revolutionary act.
Bryant McGill
That day, I learned that I could be a giver by simply bringing a smile to another person. The ensuing years have taught me that a kind word, a vote of support is a charitable gift. I can move over and make another place for someone. I can turn my music up if it pleases, or down if it is annoying. I may never be known as a philanthropist, but I certainly am a lover of mankind, and I will give freely of my resources.
Maya Angelou
Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.
Annie Lennox
I know most people want others to have good lives, and, when they understand the situation, they will do what they can to steer the world back toward kindness. This is when human beings, I believe, are most admirable.
Daoud Hari
Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.
Julian Assange
Familiarity is the gateway drug to empathy.
iO Tillett Wright
God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need.
Shane Claiborne
There is no problem that greater consciousness and compassion, enjoined with positive resolve of will cannot solve.
Bryant McGill
Without love and compassion, nothing is sacred.
Bryant McGill
Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just … another one bites the dust …" This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.
Russell Brand
The authentic human has the might of compassion and the creative power to do any manner of good.
Bryant McGill
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more intelligent and more educated than college professors.
Maya Angelou
We must quit thinking we know everything, and quit placing "knowledge" over kindness and compassion.
Bryant McGill
The solution to nearly every problem in the world comes down to greater awareness, compassion, and empathy.
Bryant McGill
Let us subdue the ravages of the baser-self, and aspire to the higher calling of exalting joy through compassion, for that is the one true purpose of humanity.
Bryant McGill
Ask the poor. They'll tell you who the christians are.
Mahatma Gandhi
As the aperture of your heart opens to love you will receive more of the light of compassion, acceptance, gentleness, grace and understanding.
Bryant McGill
Nothing on earth is as unbearable as dealing with other people if you are a person who lacks compassion and understanding.
Bryant McGill
Lead with honesty, total integrity, compassion, patience and tolerance — toward yourself!
Bryant McGill
Have compassion for people as long as you are one of them too.
Bryant McGill