Quotes by Activists - Page 68

What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation about illnesses that affect not only individuals, but their families as well.
Glenn Close
On Love - Love without trust is the love you give a dog. You may call that cute little mutt a member of the family but you don't let him in the kitchen when there's a roast on the table.
Marsha Hinds
The passive and overt violence waged against the women and children of the world must end.
Bryant McGill
Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies.
Jane Jacobs
Along with the trust issues, one of the hardest parts to deal with is the feeling of not being believed or supported, especially by your own grandparents and extended family. When I have been through so much pain and hurt and have to live with the scars every day, I get angry knowing that others think it is all made up or they brush it off because my cousin was a teenager. I was ten when I was first sexually abused by my cousin, and a majority of my relatives have taken the perpetrator's side. I have cried many times about everything and how my relatives gave no support or love to me as a kid when this all came out. Not one relative ever came up to that innocent little girl I was and said "I am sorry for what you went through" or "I am here for you." Instead they said hurtful things: "Oh he was young." "That is what kids do." "It is not like he was some older man you didn't know." Why does age make a difference? It is a sick way of thinking. Sexual abuse is sexual abuse. What is wrong with this picture? It brings tears to my eyes the way my relatives have reacted to this and cannot accept the truth. Denial is where they would rather stay.
Erin Merryn
i love playing and chatting with children...feeding and putting them to bed with a little story, and being away from the family has troubled me throughout my...life. i like relaxing at the house, reading quietly, taking in the sweet smell that comes from the pots, sitting around a table with the family and taking out my wife and children. when you can no longer enjoy these simple pleasures something valuable is taken away from your life and you feel it in your daily work.
Nelson Mandela
It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?
Russell Brand
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
Arundhati Roy
I write not for the sake of glory. Not for the sake of fame. Not of the sake of success. But for the sake of my soul.
Rachel Scott
What is the difference between Jew and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were You here before?
Elie Wiesel
When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.
Shane Claiborne
For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.
Shane Claiborne
You do not respond to a mosquito bite with a hammer.
Patrick L.O. Lumumba
Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.
Naomi Wolf
Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion, or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain?
Andrea Gibson
The human heart is so delicate and sensitive that it always needs some tangible encouragement to prevent it from faltering in its labor. The human heart is so robust, so tough, that once encouraged it beats its rhythm with a loud unswerving insistency.
Maya Angelou
And I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can't have.
Alice Walker
When it comes to love, compassion, and other feelings of the heart, I am rich.
Muhammad Ali
Poverty is a funny phenomenon. It is always defined financially and always relative to what other people earn. It is possible to be extremely happy despite having little money and being officially categorised as poverty-stricken. You can also be really unhappy despite earning a high salary. Those who always want something more will always live in poverty, regardless of how much they earn, while those who are content with what they have will always feel they have an abundance. Most poverty in the UK isn't material poverty, it's spiritual poverty, a state of mind in which fulfilment comes only from the pursuit of material gain.
Mark Boyle
Earning money from, and supporting, a system that keeps these people in poverty in the first place and then gives them some of the profits in the form of "strings-attached" aid or World Bank and IMF loans is no more ridiculous than Shell or Esso giving Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth £10,000 to help clear up the destruction that they inevitably cause. Would it not be better not to cause the destruction in the first place?
Mark Boyle
But even a medicine man like myself has to have some money, because you force me to live in your make-believe world where I can't get along without it.
John Lame Deer
I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don't pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It's not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn't that I blow five bucks at Wendy's. It's that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. There's a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there's money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.
Linda Tirado
We hold further that Communism is not only desirable, but that existing societies, founded on Individualism, are inevitably impelled in the direction of Communism. The development of Individualism during the last three centuries is explained by the efforts of the individual to protect himself from the tyranny of Capital and of the State. For a time he imagined, and those who expressed his thought for him declared, that he could free himself entirely from the State and from society. "By means of money," he said, "I can buy all that I need." But the individual was on a wrong tack, and modern history has taught him to recognize that, without the help of all, he can do nothing, although his strong-boxes are full of gold.
Pyotr Kropotkin
Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.
Peter Joseph
A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.
Derrick Jensen
I think music has the ability to inspire people and to change hearts, and the heart has the power to change the mind, and the mind has the power to change the world.
Serj Tankian
On Atheism – If people continue to think of atheism as a kind of religion, then I demand all the perks that real religions get. I want to build big empty buildings where like-minded people can gather once a week to debate a non-existent deity. I want tax-exempt status. I want real food, not cheap wine and crackers. I want a rocking band. I want altar men! Not altar boys—altar MEN—and I want them to look like the chain-clad guy who hands an envelope to RuPaul at the beginning of “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar”.
Marsha Hinds
All my ways of being are musical and mysterious.Yet I embrace you openly.Ripe with expectancy.
Maya Angelou
Well, normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big.” — Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attending his big 90th birthday bash last year)
Pete Seeger
When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.
Arundhati Roy
A musician's or artist's responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth,
Tom Morello
all bags are pack ready to go i am standing here outside your door i hate to wake you up to say goodbyedawn is braking its early mornthe taxi waiting he blowing his hornalready i am so lonesome i could dieso kiss me and smile for me tell me that you'll wait for me and hold me like you never let me gocause leaving on a jet plane don't know when ill be back again oh babe i hate to go there so many let you down so many time i played around i tell you know that don't mean a thing every plase i go i'll think of you every song i sing i'll sing for you.
John Denver
There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't.
Annie Lennox
Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words
Elie Wiesel
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou
Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.
Maya Angelou
The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?
Barbara Ehrenreich
No matter where you're from or what you've done, you're never stuck in a particular circumstance, relationship, or cycle unless you say you are.
Russell Simmons
I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library.
Emma Watson
I got a text from my husband. “Manal, you are divorced,” it read. “Your papers are in the court of Khobar.” I was divorced in my absence, just as I had been married.
Manal Al-Sharif
a real partnership in which all parties help all others to be more fully themselves
Derrick Jensen
When single you are,” Roger said, imitating Yoda dispensing advice to Luke, “get laid you can. When married you get, make love you do.
Sean Kennedy
I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.
Mahatma Gandhi
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
Gloria Steinem
Sexiness wears thin after awhile and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that is a treat.
Joanne Woodward
We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear.
Elie Wiesel
Sure relationships include arguments, but pain is not a side-effect of love.
Tyler Oakley
The storm is out there and every one of us must eventually face the storm. When the storm comes, pray that it will shake you to your roots and break you wide-open. Being broken open by the storm is your only hope. When you are broken open you get to discover for the first time what is inside you. Some people never get to see what is inside them; what beauty, what strength, what truth and love. They were never broken open by the storm. So, don't run from your pain — run into your pain. Let life's storm shatter you.
Bryant McGill
Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.
Simone Weil
Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one's own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
James Baldwin
Any pain that human beings can create, human beings can transcend.
Sarah Schulman
But the memories that hang heaviest are the easiest to recall.
Julie Gregory
But the memories that hang heaviest are the easiest to recall. They hold in their creases the ability to change one's life, organically, forever. Even when you shake them out, they've left permanent wrinkles in the fabric of your soul.
Julie Gregory
It’s common to reject or punish yourself when you’ve been rejected by others. When you experience disappointment from the way your family or others treat you, that’s the time to take special care of yourself. What are you doing to nurture yourself? What are you doing to protect yourself? Find a healthy way to express your pain.
Christina Enevoldsen
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
Rebecca Solnit
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
James Baldwin
Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
Andrew Boyd
The voices of peace can’t be silenced by bombs, shootings, sieges, brutality and barbarism. Despite the challenges we face as peace-makers in a troubled region, all we want is peace and our campaign #WeWantPeace continues.
Widad Akreyi
The victims of Ankara peace rally sacrificed their lives for peace and their only wish was We Want Peace.
Widad Akreyi