Quotes by Activists - Page 74

I think both Protestants and Catholics have killed the woman for the sake of the mother. (Rubem Alves, p. 201)
Mev Puleo
I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, and the pride.
Muriel Rukeyser
When bad things happen to men we say it’s terrible, but when bad things happen to women we say that’s just a cultural practice,” says Lou de Baca, U.S. Ambassador at Large, Office to Combat and Monitor Human Trafficking.
Nita Belles
Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
Simone Weil
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.
Andrea Dworkin
Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.
Andrea Dworkin
When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.
Andrea Dworkin
Some women I talk to are so frightened of growing old. I sense their desperation. They say things like I m not going to live to be old I m not going to live to be dependent. The message young women get from youth culture is that it s wonderful to be young and terrible to grow old. If you think about it it s an impossible dilemma how can you make a good start in life if you are being told at the same time how terrible the finish is Because of ageism many women don t fully commit themselves to living life until they can no longer pass as young. They live their lives with one foot in life and one foot outside it. With age you resolve that. I know the value of each day and I m living with both feet in life. I m living much more fully... The power of the old woman is that because she s outside the system she can attack. And I am determined to attack it. One of the ways in which I am particularly conscious of this stance is when I go down the street. People expect me to move over which means to step on the grass or off the curb. I just woke up one day to the fact that I was moving over. I have no idea how many years I ve been doing that. Now I never move over. I simply keep walking. And we hit full force because the other person is so sure that I am going to move over that he isn t even paying any attention and we simply ram each other. If it s a man with a woman he shows embarrassment because he s just knocked down a five foot seventy year old woman and so he quickly apologises. But he s startled he doesn t understand why I didn t move over he doesn t even know how I got there where I came from. I am invisible to him despite the fact that I am on my own side of the street simply refusing to give him that space he assumes is his
Barbara MacDonald
Any rapist would feel pretty dang upset to see his car packed full with rotting fish heads and limburger cheese...Also, if the 542 women responsible were crowded onto the street where he lived, insisting that he move himself and his stinky car to another locale.Nobody likes to be pelted with 2060 bloody tampons.
Inga Muscio
..by honouring the demands of our bleeding, our blood gives us something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not-at first- be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we're quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon solutions to dilemmas that've been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba 'cross de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual that so profoundly and reinforces our cuntpower.
Inga Muscio
In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.)
Gloria Steinem
My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like "intersectionality" and "equality", "oppression", and "discrimination". They didn't discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.
Janet Mock
A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not desired on the part of the woman and she has no response, it should not take place. This is an act of prostitution and is degrading to the woman's finer sensibility, all the marriage certificates on earth to the contrary notwithstanding.
Margaret Sanger
I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)
Gloria Steinem
We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
Gloria Steinem
. . . [O]nce we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.""The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.""Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.
Audre Lorde
Many women say that verbal violence causes more harm than physical violence because it damages self-esteem so deeply. Women have not wanted to hear battered women say that the verbal abuse was as hurtful as the physical abuse: to acknowledge that truth would be tantamount to acknowledging that virtually every woman is a battered woman. It is difficult to keep strong against accusations of being a bitch, stupid, inferior, etc., etc.
Suzanne Pharr
On Stripping Bark from Myself(for Jane, who said trees die from it)Because women are expected to keep silent abouttheir close escapes I will not keep silentand if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone willpleasemark the spotwhere I fall and know I could not livesilent in my own lieshearing their 'how nice she is!'whose adoration of the retouched imageI so despise.No. I am finished with livingfor what my mother believesfor what my brother and father defendfor what my lover elevatesfor what my sister, blushing, denies or rushesto embrace.I find my ownsmall persona standing selfagainst the worldan equality of willsI finally understand.Besides:My struggle was always againstan inner darkness: I carry within myselfthe only known keysto my death – to unlock life, or close it shutforever. A woman who loves wood grains, the coloryellowand the sun, I am happy to fightall outside murderersas I see I must.
Alice Walker
The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy.
Sonya Renee Taylor
Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex.
Mahatma Gandhi
When women hold off from marrying men, we call it independence. When men hold off from marrying women, we call it fear of commitment.
Warren Farrell
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
Audre Lorde
Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
Barbara Ehrenreich
No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
Margaret Sanger
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
Gloria Steinem
Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.
Gloria Steinem
To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than w
Mahatma Gandhi
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
Alice Walker
No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.
Margaret Sanger
A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
Gloria Steinem
Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.
Cheris Kramarae
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
Betty Friedan
And It was said to me: "embrace the glorious mess you are". How easy it is to see darkness in the winter shedding and not see that even in its gloominess lies great beauty. That even in our great struggles - lies within a great victory. How then does the Spring green come about without the fertilisation of the Winter brown? Isn't it the very brown that gives way and life to the green we await to goggle in awe. There is power and sheer beauty in your mess. A true triumphing chaos that renders sweet melodic honey to your journey. So again it was whispered to me "embrace the glorious mess that you are
Malebo Sephodi
What the United States call democracy is actually a vertical model of remote governance by oligarchs—economic barons and their political representatives. The result is that citizens in the United States have little control over what the U.S. government does.
S. Brian Willson
Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee...
Helen Keller
Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.
James Baldwin
Now I think that a true liberal will always prioritize individuals over the group, will always prioritize heresy over orthodoxy, will always prioritize the dissenting voice over the status quo.
Maajid Nawaz
History is really a study of the future, not the past.
Arundhati Roy
Everyone is familiar with the slogan "The personal is political" -- not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.
Angela Y. Davis
To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
Rebecca Solnit
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.
Rebecca Solnit
We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into life.-Martin Luther King Jr.
Maya Angelou
Policemen always call me a stupid bitch, and I deny that I'm stupid.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
Leaders who do not help the people must be replaced by the people.
DaShanne Stokes
We elected a man who knows how to build walls when we needed someone who knows how to build bridges.
DaShanne Stokes
I've fought for religious freedom and I can tell you that anti-gay 'religious freedom' bills aren't it.
DaShanne Stokes
Today's 'religious freedom' policies should not be seen as a problem limited to LGBT people but as a co-optation of religion that affects us all.
DaShanne Stokes
Activists have not been passive. For decades, we have tried every tactic to shift the course of our governments. We have voted, written editorials and manifestos, donated money, held signs, protests in marches, blocked streets, shared links, signed petitions, held workshops, knitted scarves, learn to farm, turned off the television, programmed apps, engaged in direct action, committed vandalism, launched legal challenges against pipelines . . . and occupied the financial districts. All this has been for naught. A new approach to activism and a new kind of protest are desperately needed.
Micah White
Electing a bigot enables further bigotry.
DaShanne Stokes
Denying the popular vote is un-American and anti-democratic.
DaShanne Stokes
We owe our loyalty to each other and to our children's children, not to party politics.
DaShanne Stokes
Laws forbidding adoptees from accessing their original birth certificates are outdated and need to be changed today.
DaShanne Stokes
Truth is hard, propaganda is cheap.
DaShanne Stokes
Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.
DaShanne Stokes
No matter their party, people with a conflict of interest should be banned from the Electoral College.
DaShanne Stokes
Accepting fraud from our leaders means accepting fraud in our personal lives.
DaShanne Stokes
Fascism thrives in obscurity and darkness.
DaShanne Stokes
If you lay with a scorpion, don't be surprised when it finally stings you.
DaShanne Stokes
If this were a courageous country,it would ask Gloria to lead itsince she is sane and funny and beautiful and smartand the National Leaders we've always hadare not.When I listen to her talk about women's rightschildren's rightsmen's rightsI think of the long line of Americans who should have been president, but weren't.Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth.John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo.Imagine President Martin Luther King confrontingthe youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine PresidentMalcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President StevieWonder dealing with the "Truly Needy."Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, orSweet Honey in the Rockdealing with Anything.It is imagining to make us weep with frustration,as we languish under real estate dealers, killers, and bad actors.
Alice Walker
Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads.
DaShanne Stokes