Quotes by Activists - Page 54

The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse "los," meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.
Rebecca Solnit
We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those who have known suffering.
Helen Keller
You don't know who is important to you until you actually lose them.
Mahatma Gandhi
I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect.
Mahatma Gandhi
The ability to forgive is one of man’s greatest achievements.
Bryant McGill
Someone, somewhere, needs to take courage to break the cycle of violence. Forgiveness is superior to justice. Being kind and compassionate to those who are good to you is easy. True forgiveness and compassion come only when one is able to forgive even those who have committed barbaric acts. If Angulimala is capable of renouncing violence, then tell me, your Majesty: is your civilized society also capable of being truly civilized and renouncing violence?
Satish Kumar
I had thought about forgiveness more and more...I knew it wasn't a light that could be switched on in an instant-it grew day by day, week by week, month by month-but something was changing inside me now during the hours when I sat alone and tried to calm my feelings. A seed had been sown, and I sensed that, just as I'd once faced a choice about whether to use violence on the night when I stared at the gun, I know had another choice: to remain trapped in the bitterness of the past or to find peace in the present.
Emmanuel Jal
Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance.
Rebecca Solnit
Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.
Nelson Mandela
Perhaps one of the most powerful things the contemporary church could do is to confess our sins to the world, the humbly get on our knees and repent for the terrible things we have done in the name of God.
Shane Claiborne
Someone's forgiveness will not heal you; condemnation or absolution is their test, not yours.
Bryant McGill
Forgive for yourself and for the peace it will bring to your pain.
Bryant McGill
The ability to forgive is one of man's greatest achievements.
Bryant McGill
Through forgiveness you can be free of the tragedies and pain in other people's failures.
Bryant McGill
Forgiveness can help you to be sane.
Bryant McGill
Remember that many "negative" people were conditioned by people with smaller minds and hearts, so forgive them.
Bryant McGill
Do not wallow in your mistakes. Do not grovel and prostrate yourself in hopes of forgiveness. We all make mistakes. Apologize and move forward. Do not replay the event in your head. Do not continue to beat yourself up. Do not profusely explain, defend yourself, make excuses or blame. After you apologize, do no more explaining; never explain more than once — ever.
Bryant McGill
A good place to begin, is to forgive yourself for judging in the first place.
Bryant McGill
To live a wonderful life create more, buy less, hug more, scold less, give more, take less, forgive more, worry less and be grateful everyday for life.
Bryant McGill
To forgive another person means you have first condemned them. When we condemn others we condemn ourselves.
Bryant McGill
Forgiveness is about your peace of mind. When you don't forgive, you are the one who suffers.
Bryant McGill
Forgiveness is another way of saying, "I need to mind my own business.
Bryant McGill
Forgiveness, no matter your motive, is a dynamic of mutual healing.
Bryant McGill
When you reach out to those you need to forgive, it is you that will be touched and healed.
Bryant McGill
Even when I knew people were cheating me, what was important was how I behaved, because I have to answer to God. I can't be responsible for other people's actions: They will have to answer to God themselves
Muhammad Ali
Throughout my life, I never sought retribution against those who hurt me because I believe in forgiveness. I have practiced forgiving, just as I want to be forgiven. Only God knows what's in a person's heart, his true intentions. He sees and hears all things.
Muhammad Ali
I no longer look to my abusers with any expectation– of remorse, or apology or restitution or restoration or relationship. I’m at peace, accepting that they won’t and can’t help me out of the mess they created. But, I’m the best qualified for that job anyway and I’m happy with the job I’m doing.
Christina Enevoldsen
Forgiving is not forgetting. It is actually remembering - remembering and not using your right to hit back
Archbishop Desmont Tutu
It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.
Simone Weil
I no longer ask You for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware and worthy of Your listening. I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You. I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship. Love? Love is not Yours to give.As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers. If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers, but not Your countenance.They are modest, my prayers, and humble. I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land. I ask You, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too. I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith. I only implore You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together
Elie Wiesel
I close my eyes and melt in its embrace, basking in the sweetest balm of forgiveness: that for which one need not even ask.
Leslie Cannold
There's a hard law, mejuffrou, that when a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.
Alan Paton
Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it's something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it.
Rebecca Solnit
Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.
Coretta Scott King
There is a hard law. When an injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.
Alan Paton
As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.
Nelson Mandela
Within the moment of now, there is presence of ever there, As It is;, Invisible; Nothingness; of Still and silent awareness; in substratum; witnessing itself which U in real R...It has nothing to do with Your mind, Your body appearance and Your world...Wisdom is to let it recognize and and realize itself...Often in Ignorance of IT, ignorant start believing "In the Moment", "As It Is" words, which point towards IT (awareness), ignorantly for the appearing body, appearing mind and appearing creation...Be Happy and Keep Smiling...
Satish Kumar
I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.
Maya Angelou
I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.
James Baldwin
Ursula, we have to talk…' he said, almost blurting. He couldn’t believe he was in the “we have to talk” position. It was so unnerving. 'I have to ask you… Let’s be each other’s emergency contact numbers.' This was his first concession towards commitment.
Sharon Weil
If you are trading silence or compliance for love, you are being cheated. When acceptance or love is withheld if you reveal secrets, the value of the relationship is just an illusion. Love cannot be earned, bought or traded–only freely given. You are worthy of love that doesn’t require you to protect your abuser or sacrifice yourself.
Christina Enevoldsen
Abuse and respect are diametric opposites: You do not respect someone whom you abuse, and you do not abuse someone whom you respect.
Lundy Bancroft
When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us.
Audre Lorde
But what was good tween us must have been nothing but bodies, she say. Cause I don't know the Albert that don't dance, can't hardly laugh, never talk bout nothing, beat you and hid your sister Nettie's letters. Who he?
Alice Walker
No construct on earth will stand, that does not stand for the least among them, as their advocate and humble servant.
Bryant McGill
Nationalism is form of collective narcissism, where the citizens possess an inflated self-love of "their own people," to the exclusion of other human beings.
Bryant McGill
Religious fundamentalism, magical thinking and self-delusion, have been justifications for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history.
Bryant McGill
We cannot trust our own minds, traditions and beliefs.
Bryant McGill
In a relationship, when trust is lost, everything is lost.
Bryant McGill
You have permission to walk away from anything that doesn't feel right. Trust your instincts and listen to your inner-voice — it's trying to protect you.
Bryant McGill
There are many paths beyond the rules of limited thinking. Trust your instincts!
Bryant McGill
Trust others and you will be more trusted.
Bryant McGill
We must allow people the space and time of discovery, and trust in all that is to come.
Bryant McGill
We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It's like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That's what is happening. We are being asked by the countries that invented nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and apartheid and modern slavery and racism - countries that have perfected the gentle art of genocide, that colonized other people for centuries - to trust them when they say that they believe in a level playing field and the equitable distribution of resources and in a better world. It seems comical that we should even consider that they really mean what they say.
Arundhati Roy
In our weeks of talk, movies and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition. I believe she was teaching me an intimate form of The Way. In her words: "Every day is a good day - because we are part of everything alive.
Gloria Steinem
We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.
Elie Wiesel
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James Baldwin
Thank you adversity. Oh, how we stretch and grow in the shadows of darkness just to reach the light.
Bryant McGill
We co-create when we reach out and touch souls. Like rays of light—where they converge—twice as bright.
Bryant McGill
Love is the light that brightens every heart's darkness.
Bryant McGill