Quotes by Activists - Page 53

As Christians, we should be the best collaborators in the world. We should be quick to find unlikely allies and subversive friends, like Jesus did.
Shane Claiborne
There are Atheists in foxholesAtheists in hurricanesThere are Atheists in all the rolesDenied by your refrainsAtheists are your fellow citizensPeople who love and laugh and cryAtheists are your relatives and friendsDon't insult them with a lieAtheists in many foxholes servedAnd some have had to dieGive Atheists the thanks deservedDon't dismiss them with a lieAtheists are all around youThey work, they help, they careAnd no matter what you think is trueAtheists are everywhereAnd no matter what you think is trueThey do not want your prayer
Edwin Kagin
Know before whom thou stands. Understand your friends for who they are, not who you wish them to be. Accept them for their flaws as well as their attributes. Turn to them for their strengths, what good stuff they can bring to your life, and forget about the rest. To ask for more only sets you up for failure.
Fran Drescher
No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.
James Baldwin
The highway of human possibility extends on forever into unknown territories, which have not yet been imagined.
Bryant McGill
Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds.
Rebecca Solnit
Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always the key to her deepest distress. She must watch and guide, but he must lead, and he will always appear to be giving far more of his real attention to his comrades than he is giving to her. But that noisy, outward openness of men with each other enables them to deal with the silence and secrecy of women, that silence and secrecy which contains the truth of a man, and releases it. I suppose that the root of the resentment—a resentment which hides a bottomless terror—has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man’s imagination makes of her—literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman’s.—Anyway, in this fucked up time and place, the whole thing becomes ridiculous when you realize that women are supposed to be more imaginative than men. This is an idea dreamed up by men, and it proves exactly the contrary. The truth is that dealing with the reality of men leaves a woman very little time, or need, for imagination. And you can get very fucked up, here, once you take seriously the notion that a man who is not afraid to trust his imagination (which is all that men have ever trusted) if effeminate. It says a lot about this country, because, of course, if all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination. Or women, for that matter: or men.
James Baldwin
Violence is for those who have lost their imagination.
Shane Claiborne
The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction.
Helen Keller
Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate. He held her close by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as though he had been polished with a high-wax body polish.
Arundhati Roy
Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.
Gloria Steinem
Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.
Rebecca Solnit
To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.
Arundhati Roy
Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.
Rebecca Solnit
I think repressing what happened is what saved me in my childhood. I was able to use my imagination to create happy events, but a little girl can carry only so much on her own.
Erin Merryn
Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.
Arundhati Roy
We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.
Marge Piercy
When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde
Ultimately, we all have to decide what our own life is for. I will die one day, and, whether my day is near or far, I choose to look back on my time and know that I walked through the doors that inspired me.
Shaun Chamberlin
Isn’t it sad that so often it takes facing death to appreciate life and each other fully?
Esther Earl
I forget, because it’s hard to realize that the same person who gives you so much love, and to whom you give so much in return, can go through the kinds of pain and suffering that nothing you do can alleviate.
Esther Earl
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND TELL EVERYONEABOUT...THE REAL WAR ON WOMENON YAZIDI GIRLS & WOMEN
Widad Akreyi
WHILE THE WORLD'S ASLEEP, ANGELS REFUSE TO SLEEP!
Widad Akreyi
Sad.” She lets out a bitter laugh. “Life is full of sadness. It’s part of being a woman. Our lives are lived for the sake of others. Our happiness is never factored in. Do I want this life? Living here and seeing my husband a few times a year, raising my daughter alone? I don’t know what it was like for you in America, but this is how life is. This is reality. But this advice is coming too late. It’s meaningless now.
Aisha Saeed
She touched her fingertip to his wet face and brought away a tear. Amazed, he did the same. He tasted this river his own eyes had rained."It tastes of salt!" he exclaimed. "It tastes like the sea!""Mine too!" she laughed through her own tears, and he touched and tasted hers as well. "It's as if humans kept a sign of the mother sea in ourselves, a secret token of grief or gladness.
Robin Morgan
When I was a girl I would look out my bedroom window at the caterpillars; I envied them so much. No matter what they were before, no matter what happened to them, they could just hide away and turn into these beautiful creatures that could fly away completely untouched.
Patch Adams
We are all frail-embodied creatures, who at times suffer through injustice, abuse, illness, pain and misfortune.
Bryant McGill
We are the environment. The world is literally one biological process. The trees are our lungs. Look at the Amazon River system next to a human cardiovascular system, look at corals or trees and look at our lungs, you literally cannot tell the difference. They’re the same. So when we destroy our environment, we’re effectively destroying ourselves.
Ian Somerhalder
Let your greatest possession be the ability to let go of any possession, joyfully.
Bryant McGill
The joy and smile of even one child is worth more than the prancing intellects of a thousand men
Bryant McGill
Respect is that great spirit of good, which creates the beautiful space giving all souls the simple room to breathe.
Bryant McGill
We must share! Sharing IS caring. Share everything: every idea, every resource, every story, every gift, every worry and every burden. Share yourself.
Bryant McGill
The truth is now as it was yesterday, and as it always will be, that the world is-as we are
Bryant McGill
The individual cannot exist outside of the many spheres of the deeply interconnected webs of life
Bryant McGill
When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don't try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They're sacred. they are part of each person's journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone. That's the one fear you can alleviate.
Glennon Doyle Melton
Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing.
Mia Farrow
To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packaging it for TVspecials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain itof meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillagingof even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to itspeople.
Arundhati Roy
If you try to hold people to your standard of conduct you will go mad with disappointment and grief.
Bryant McGill
There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There's no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman's excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We've all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong?
Lierre Keith
Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.
James Baldwin
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
Arundhati Roy
Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.
Arundhati Roy
I do hope that when the day comes, whether in 1, 10, or 100 years, I don’t want you to think of me and feel sad.
Esther Earl
The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.
Andrea Gibson
Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.
Alice Walker
The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.
Andrea Dworkin
Funny how an absence can feel like a presence, like that space practically glows with her outline and make me notice how she's not here.
Joan Steinau Lester
Institutions have processes favoring efficiency over loss, and process over people.
Bryant McGill
If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world.
Helen Keller
What is so sweet as to awake from a troubled dream and behold a beloved face smiling upon you? I love to believe that such shall be our awakening from earth to heaven. My faith never wavers that each dear friend I have “lost” is a new link between this world and the happier land beyond the morn. My soul is for the moment bowed down with grief when I cease to feel the touch of their hands or hear a tender word from them; but the light of faith never fades from the sky, and I take heart again, glad they are free. I cannot understand why anyone should fear death…Suppose there are a million chances against that one that my loved ones who have gone on are alive. What of it? I will take that one chance and risk mistake, rather than let any doubts sadden their souls, and find out afterward. Since there is that one chance of immortality, I will endeavor not to cast a shadow on the joy of the departed…Certainly it is one of our sweetest experiences that when we are touched by some noble affection or pure joy, we remember the dead most tenderly, and feel more powerfully drawn to them.
Helen Keller
We human beings don't realize how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, and two ears to hear the words of love. As I found with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose one.
Malala Yousafzai
In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn't. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say "I'm sorry" to, "I didn't mean it" to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent--holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting.
Joseph Hansen
The fullness of life's balancing grace will demand the symmetry of recompense for all your loss and pain.
Bryant McGill
The fearful have lost faith while the fearless allow faith to lead the way.
Bryant McGill
There is more than one way to lose your life; quickly through violence, or fettered-away and wasted around dreadful, toxic people.
Bryant McGill
We have all suffered losses and pain, but no loss is greater than a life lost holding-on to a painful past.
Bryant McGill
What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
Helen Keller
Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.
Rebecca Solnit
Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis the flash of your head goingaround a corneryour smile, breaking before me,the flippant last turnof a revolving door,emptying you out, changed,away from me.Even as I hold youI am letting go.
Alice Walker
Loving people and animals makes us stronger in the right ways and weaker in the right ways. Even if animals and people leave, even if they die, they leave us better. So we keep loving, even though we might lose, because loving teaches us and changes us.
Glennon Doyle Melton