Quotes by Activists - Page 73

There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change.
Coretta Scott King
Loss is an inevitable part of change.
Sharon Weil
Change occurs on a continuum and does not move in a straight line.
Sharon Weil
Every journey towards change begins with awareness.
Sharon Weil
Discovering that I was adopted redefined my entire world, but it taught me that who you are doesn't change.
DaShanne Stokes
Being denied their original birth certificates isn't just a problem for adoptees. It's a social problem, requiring social change.
DaShanne Stokes
Racist legacy laws and modern racist practices are all part of the same system, and it needs to be changed now.
DaShanne Stokes
The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don’t change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it’s that of a nation or a single human being.
Rebecca Solnit
How much could the person you love change, and still remain the same person to whom you'd made your promise? We don't expect our lovers to remain the same over the course of a long relationship. In fact, if you're married at sixty-five to the same person you married when you were twenty, your marriage has probably failed. But there are changes, over time, that spell doom for a marriage, although exactly what these are, and to what degree, varies from couple to couple. For some people, vast changes over time make no difference to the fundamental sense of devotion one soul has for another. But for others, relatively small changes can push things to the breaking point: gaining or losing weight, gaining or losing faith, gaining or losing wealth. How does any relationship survive in the end, when change is the only constant?
Jennifer Finney Boylan
It is through victims such as myself who still have a voice that the world will change to be a better place.
Catherine Jane Fisher
In order to validate our Africanness, we hold on to tradition at all cost, banning critical engagement in an attempt to preserve its sacredness
Malebo Sephodi
We must throw out the old, fear-based thought-forms and evolve, and begin to live as higher beings of compassion.
Bryant McGill
Only by speaking out can we create lasting change. And that change begins with coming out.
DaShanne Stokes
If the people of God were to transform the world through fascination, these amazing teachings had to work at the center of these peculiar people. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then walk with that child a couple of miles. Look into the eys of tax collectors as they sue you in court; see their poverty and give them your coat. Look in to the eys of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love. For God loves good and bad people.
Shane Claiborne
You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.
Marian Wright Edelman
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
James Baldwin
Love is an expression of power. We can use it to transform our world.
Ericka Huggins
...my body has becomeanother countryand I feel like an unemployedillegal alienhow will I survivewhere I do not belongI belong with you
Patrick Califia-Rice
We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.
Sonia Johnson
As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.
Charles W. Chesnutt
You really can change the world if you care enough.
Marian Wright Edelman
If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.
Anita Roddick
Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
Arundhati Roy
No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a third power stronger than both, that of women.
Malala Yousafzai
Remember, this is your day and your world.
Amelia Boynton Robinson
I can never do justice to the great feeling of amazement and encouragement I felt when, perhaps for the first time in American history, white citizens of a Southern state banded together to come to Selma and show their indignation about the injustices against the African-Americans.
Amelia Boynton Robinson
It’s important that young people know about the struggles we faced to get to the point we are today. Only then will they appreciate the hard-won freedom of blacks in this country.
Amelia Boynton Robinson
Get off of my shoulders. The foundation has been laid, now its time for you to build on it and get to work.
Amelia Boynton Robinson
There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.
James Baldwin
It is important to note that when Mary Magdalene and other women were chosen by Jesus to bring the important news to the men, the men did not believe the women. Today 2,000 years later men still don't believe women when they say "We are also chosen by Jesus to be leaders in the church.
Roy Bourgeois
At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women's "libbers", bra burners, and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters...that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a "postfeminist" age...
Gloria Steinem
Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.
Audre Lorde
Women at the top are the ones chosen to be there by men and not eliminated by women, a dual filter that excludes most witches: those with brilliance and originality and those capable of disturbing the status quo.
Heather Marsh
Women not only bear the brunt of the equation of beauty with youth, we perpetuate it—every time we dye our hair to cover the gray or lie about our age, not to mention have plastic surgery to cover the signs of aging.
Ashton Applewhite
To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.
Maya Angelou
Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black hijab.
Rebecca Solnit
If you want to run for Prime Minister, you can. If you don’t, that’s wonderful, too. Shave your armpits, don’t shave them, wear flats one day, heels the next. These things are so irrelevant and surface to what it is all really about, and I wish people wouldn’t get caught up in that. We want to empower women to do exactly what they want, to be true to themselves, to have the opportunities to develop.
Emma Watson
The saddest thing a girl can do is dumb herself down for a guy.
Emma Watson
When at 15, my girlfriends started dropping out of their beloved sports teams, because they didn’t want to appear muscle-y, when at 18, my male friends were unable to express their feelings, I decided that I was a feminist.
Emma Watson
they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.
Marge Piercy
I want to be a Renaissance Woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I just want to do everything.
Emma Watson
When all you know is pain you don’t know that that is not normal. It is not a woman’s lot to suffer, even if we’ve been raised that
Susan Sarandon
Pay equality is not going to happen because we scream and yell about it, it's going to happen when we start demandin
Susan Sarandon
How is it possible to live? Life is so hard?’‘You must be harder than life, Firdaus. Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.’‘But you are not hard, Sharifa, so how do you manage to live?’‘I am hard, terribly hard, Firdaus.’‘No, you are gentle and soft.’‘My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite deadly.’‘Like a snake?’‘Yes, exactly like a snake. Life is a snake. They are the same, Firdaus. If the snake realises you are not a snake, it will bite you. And if life knows you have no sting, it will devour you.
Nawal El-Saadawi
Where there is society there is no need for charity.
Heather Marsh
They sensed somehow that she lived in the prenumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous. So on the days that the radio played Ammu's songs, people avoided her, making little loops around her, because everybody agreed that it was best to just Let Her Be.
Arundhati Roy
The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.
Gloria Steinem
When feminists create “safe spaces” for adult women...I seriously question why any woman would identify as a feminist. Feminists literally treat adult women like three year olds. How does this empower you to make smart choices about your life? How does this embolden you to go after what you want?....If feminists followed the dictionary, they wouldn’t fear #WomenAgainstFeminism and work so desperately to exclude them from the conversation about gender and equality. They would engage in debate and offer evidence....But they don’t. They file false reports, claim abuse and harassment where none took place and ultimately, expose the heart of fascist, intolerant, hateful darkness at the core of feminism.
Janet Bloomfield
Trigger warnings are the most ridiculous, patronizing and infantilizing creations ever to come out of feminism....But feminists adore trigger warnings because it reinforces the idea that women are ruled by their emotions, are incapable of recovering from trauma and are just generally hysterical nitwits unprepared to confront adulthood and reality.
Janet Bloomfield
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You hear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.
Audre Lorde
[The ideology of beauty] has grown strong to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly.
Naomi Wolf
Straight women love a feminine sensibility in a man, but that love only goes up to, and unfortunately does not quite pass, the fact of his being an actual woman.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
I like driving cab. Receptionists, sales clerks, waitresses -- they all have to look pleasant all the time. I can snarl if I want. There ain't too many women who can do that. Maybe garment workers are allowed to snarl at their sewing machines. But women mostly have to look pleasant when they're fucking miserable, and smile when they're angry.
Helen Potrebenko
How can I believe the people that say women have equal rights? When the worst insult a man can be called is a woman, girly, a twat, a cunt, that he needs to 'man up' and the list goes on. My gender is not an insult. I'm tired of all this shit.
Laura Bates
This is not a men vs women issue. It’s about people vs prejudice.
Laura Bates
I was lonely, desperate, and angry. At that moment, I truly understood what it meant to be a Saudi woman. It meant being confronted with every possible kind ofobstacle and discrimination. It meant being told that if you want to race with men, you’d have to do it with your hands and legs cut off. I started to wish I had been born somewhere—anywhere—else.
Manal Al-Sharif
How odd it is that we judge a woman by her clothes and the place she eats lunch and the subjects she talks about with her colleagueson her coffee break, yet we don’t judge a man if he doesn’t grow his beard or if he works with women or speaks to them. Why do Saudi women allow subjugation to a man and adhere to men’s rules and conditions? Why did I?
Manal Al-Sharif
So you’re the infamous Manal al-Sharif,” he said, eyeing me from behind his desk. “Aren’t you ashamed of what you did?”“Is driving a car something shameful?” I answered back.
Manal Al-Sharif
In its various forms, so far as we know them, Love seems always to have a deep significance and a most practical importance to us little mortals. In one form, as the mere semi-conscious Sex-love, which runs through creation and is common to the lowest animals and plants, it appears as a kind of organic basis for the unity of all creatures; in another, as the love of the mother for her offspring—which may also be termed a passion—it seems to pledge itself to the care and guardianship of the future race; in another, as the marriage of man and woman, it becomes the very foundation of human society. And so we can hardly believe that in its homogenic form, with which we are here concerned, it has not also a deep significance, and social uses and functions which will become clearer to us, the more we study it.
Edward Carpenter
Anyhow, with their extraordinary gift for, and experience in, affairs of the heart from the double point of view, both of the man and of the woman it is not difficult to see that these people have a special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other.
Edward Carpenter