Quotes by Activists - Page 76

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances freedom to others. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.
Nelson Mandela
Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement, not till he’s shown his colors, run the people, making laws. Experience, there’s the test.
Nelson Mandela
In forgiving others, I free myself towards belonging and wholeness, be it with the person I am forgiving, or with myself.
Sharon Weil
Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.
Coretta Scott King
An institution rooted in slavery can never set us free.
DaShanne Stokes
Free elections don't always result in fair elections.
DaShanne Stokes
I was able to take that first step to freedom.
Catherine Jane Fisher
When the whole world is silent,Even one voice becomes powerful.
Malala Yousafzai
Most women are one man away from welfare.
Gloria Steinem
This is what happens when the state intervenes in a person’s private life; it creates two separate personas. It compels you either to lead two separate lives, or to violate what’s imposed on youwhen the state isn’t looking.
Manal Al-Sharif
When the women begin to take an active part in the struggle, no power on earth can stop us from achieving freedom in our lifetime.
Nelson Mandela
Along my journey I have seen the horrors that humans can inflict on one another, but I've also witnessed acts of tenderness and kindness and sacrifice in the worst imaginable circumstances. I know that it is possible to lose part of your humanity in order to survive. But I also know that the spark of human dignity is never completely extinguished, and that given the oxygen of freedom and the power of love, it can grow again.
Yeonmi Park
Freedom means equality. If you don't believe in equality for all, you don't believe in freedom.
DaShanne Stokes
America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.
Tom Morello
There can never be any real freedom on earth as long as people try to exert ownership over the natural resources of the world.
Bryant McGill
Each person carries within their core the birthright of creative freedom, which, when organized and orchestrated, is the most awesome force on earth.
Bryant McGill
No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.
Wendy McElroy
From this day onward whatever circumstances may jam my way I'll break through it unscathed for in the end who will but suffer but me, so much so that I will reach for the unreachable, I'll break that which is unbreakable and attain that is impossible!
Liliosa Hilao
It is not in becoming a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man's world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her seperateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not his. Prostitution may be against the written law, but no prostitute has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men who enjoy them.
Andrea Dworkin
Freedom is to live with dignity
Manal Al-Sharif
There are turning points in everyone's life when we have to fight, even if we have to do it by ourselves and in public.
Junius Williams
The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect.More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation.
Naomi Wolf
Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless.'-archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 2001
Naomi Klein
With all these occurrences of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom, then for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear to be the boundaries and smack against them like a heart against the rib cage. If we reveal boundaries in the course of our movements, then we will expose the inherent lie in the use of the word freedom. I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect. I don't know what's ahead of me in the course of my life and this civilization. I just don't feel I have reached the necessary things inside my history that would ease the pressure in my skull and in my future and in my present. It is exhausting, living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.
David Wojnarowicz
You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.
Naomi Wolf
It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
It's our goddamed city! It's our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! Take it back!
Cory Doctorow
For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.
Rebecca Solnit
Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.
Faye Wattleton
Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.
Nelson Mandela
Don't let the man bring you down.
Maya Angelou
Do not make the mistake of thinking that you have to agree with people and their beliefs to defend them from injustice.
Bryant McGill
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
Muhammad Ali
I want freedom for the full expression of my personality.
Mahatma Gandhi
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
James Baldwin
For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Nelson Mandela
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
Audre Lorde
When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
Nelson Mandela
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi
Where do dreams come from?...they slink out of books, they lurk in the stacks of libraries. Out of pages turned they rise like the scent of peonies and infect the brain with their promises.
Marge Piercy
If your dreams don't scare you, they aren't big enough.
Muhammad Ali
Without leaps of the imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning
Gloria Steinem
Never quit on your one and only dream !!!
Raven Kaldera
The most pathetic person in the world is some one who has sight but no vision.
Helen Keller
I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war
Jeannette Rankin
From what I could see, men or women, children or adults, young or aged, rich or poor, war was making everyone equal.
Alephonsion Deng
It is time to recognize the past and ongoing genocides to prevent new ones. Together we can build a better world!
Widad Akreyi
Let’s stand against the killing of innocent civilians. It is time to make the future better than today. Together we can bring peace and unity to our communities.
Widad Akreyi
Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else freedom.
Maya Angelou
We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.
Arundhati Roy
I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it must always happen "here" before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves.
James Baldwin
I disagreed with the conduct of the war, with bombing civilians, categorizing everyone as the enemy or simply as armed men, with the racism and the disregard for those people.
Joe Glenton
Now I am writing this diary in English, which for me is not the language of intimacy or love, but an attempt at distance and sanity, a means of recalling normality.
Jasmina Tešanović
I think of myself as a political idiot. Idiot, in ancient Greece, denoted a common person without access to knowledge and information--all women, by definition, and most men. I am unable to make judgments. I see no options I can identify with. Is that normal?
Jasmina Tešanović
Do you know what we call windows in Belgrade?' she asked. All our windows are broken and crisscrossed with scotch tape. 'Windows 99.
Jasmina Tešanović
A third-grader when WWII started, I was also waging my own "war effort." It was deeply magical thinking—I really thought what I did or didn't do could save lives, win battles, bring my dad and uncles home safe. And conversely, that if I screwed up, they were all in greater danger.
Ann Medlock
When we fight wars, money is no object. When we choose peace, we ration every penny.
Joel Berg
People turned against each other cannot turn against those responsible.
DaShanne Stokes
...when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future-and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.
James Baldwin
Nonviolence simply cannot defend property rights over human rights.
David T. Dellinger