Quotes by Activists - Page 77

We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.
Grace Paley
13)tHave you had your own, personal earthquake? Here is what it feels like. Your insides feel like they are stretched, ready to explode. And from outside, there is a crushing pressure that is holding you down, pinning you with a force that you’ve never known. You cannot breathe. You cannot move. You cannot understand any of the words that are being said to you. A water curtain falls in front of your face, as tears drench your eyes blurring everything in sight.
Kirthi Jayakumar
Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.
Arundhati Roy
Arms control is by definition a rejection of disarmament.
David T. Dellinger
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace.
David T. Dellinger
It turned out to be a war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pillai, would end almost before it began. Victory was gifted to him wrapped and beribboned, on a silver tray. Only then, when it was too late, and Paradise Pickles slumped softly to the floor without so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance, did Comrade Pillai realize that what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory. War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.
Arundhati Roy
Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)
Arundhati Roy
Patriotism is nationalism, and always leads to war.
Helen Caldicott
I don't know how to stop the atrocities. I don't know how to make people care. But looking into my sister's eyes, we seem to have carved out something between us that none of the madness can touch. Invisible threads.
Lisa J. Shannon
The greatest threat to peace is the barrage of rightist propaganda portraying war as decent, honorable, and patriotic.
Jeannette Rankin
..when a war ends, what does that look like exactly?do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves?does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother?when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glassand our reflection is not something we can stand to look atdoes the white flag make for a perfect blindfold?yesterday i was told a storyabout this little girl in Iraq, six-years-old,who cannot fall asleepbecause when she doesshe dreams of nothingbut the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor's corpse.if you told her war is overdo you think she can sleep?
Andrea Gibson
The quality of life in our world does not depend on the conflicts that arise, but on our response to them.
Widad Akreyi
Death and injury caused by armed violence is one of the most shameful epidemics of our age.
Widad Akreyi
Armed violence and peace cannot coexist. We need to overcome the challenges we face and seek practical solutions. We must replace the culture of war with the culture of peace.
Widad Akreyi
Each day is an opportunity to build the defenses of peace in the minds of people.
Widad Akreyi
Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people's babies.
Sonya Renee Taylor
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
 all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
Julia Ward Howe
Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.
Mahatma Gandhi
The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.
Naomi Klein
Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That's just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that's what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.
Naomi Klein
Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.
Muhammad Ali
But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in
Arundhati Roy
Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?
Arundhati Roy
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.
Mahatma Gandhi
You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.
Naomi Klein
Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.
Naomi Klein
this is the 21st century and we need to redefine r/evolution. this planet needs a people’s r/evolution. a humanist r/evolution. r/evolution is not about bloodshed or about going to the mountains and fighting. we will fight if we are forced to but the fundamental goal of r/evolution must be peace.we need a r/evolution of the mind. we need a r/evolution of the heart. we need a r/evolution of the spirit. the power of the people is stronger than any weapon. a people’s r/evolution can’t be stopped. we need to be weapons of mass construction. weapons of mass love. it’s not enough just to change the system. we need to change ourselves. we have got to make this world user friendly. user friendly.are you ready to sacrifice to end world hunger. to sacrifice to end colonialism. to end neo-colonialism. to end racism. to end sexism.r/evolution means the end of exploitation. r/evolution means respecting people from other cultures. r/evolution is creative.r/evolution means treating your mate as a friend and an equal. r/evolution is sexy.r/evolution means respecting and learning from your children. r/evolution is beautiful.r/evolution means protecting the people. the plants. the animals. the air. the water. r/evolution means saving this planet.r/evolution is love.
Assata Shakur
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Audre Lorde
Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.
Alice Walker
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.
Elie Wiesel
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi
Direct democracy is lazy anarchy, for people who don't want to be governed but are too lazy to govern themselves. They want participation served to them.
Heather Marsh
I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
James Baldwin
Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with.
Rachel Corrie
If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.
Cory Doctorow
People can cry much easier than they can change.
James Baldwin
I threw my 20th birthday party at Brown, and I didn’t even have to say to anyone not to put pictures on Facebook. Not a single picture went up. That was when I knew I’d found a solid group of friends, and I felt like I belonged.
Emma Watson
In all my close friendships, words are the bricks I use to build bridges. To know someone I need to hear her, and to feel known, I need to be heard by her. The process of knowing and loving another person happens for me through conversation. I reveal something to help my friend understand me, she responds in a way that assures me she values my revelation, and then she adds something to help me understand her. This back-and-forth is repeated again and again as we go deeper into each other's hearts, minds, pasts, and dreams. Eventually, a friendship is built - a solid, sheltering structure that exists in the space between us - a space outside of ourselves that we can climb deep into. There is her, there is me, and then there is our friendship - this bridge we've built together.
Glennon Doyle Melton
We think our job as humans is to avoid pain, our job as parents is to protect our children from pain, and our job as friends is to fix each other's pain. Maybe that's why we all feel like failures so often - because we all have the wrong job description for love.
Glennon Doyle Melton
Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).
Simone Weil
I'm worried about my friend not being imagined complexly enough.
Esther Earl
I wondered ...if meeting people with creativity and passion when you were at an impressionable enough age actually kind of ruined you for life among normal people. For a long time, I'd searched the world, thinking I could start up new friendships like the ones I'd had before. But I never met people like that again. I know people will think that's what everyone believes about their college friends, but it's true. Maybe we're like flowers that open up at that brief moment in our lives, and after that, we close up again, one by one.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
It's funny how you can know a person, think of him as your closest friend, and still never gain access to the secret chambers in his heart.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, and listening.
Sarah Schulman
They were your friends?""Yes, they were my friends.""And they will leave you to suffer alone?""Now I see it.""And until this, were they friends you could trust?""I could trust them.""I see what you mean. You mean they were the kind of friends that a good man could choose, upright, hard-working, obeying the law?Tell me, were they such friends?And now they leave you alone?Did you not see it before?""I saw it.
Alan Paton
That men of this kind despise women, though a not uncommon belief, is one which hardly appears to be justified. Indeed, though naturally not inclined to 'fall in love' in this direction, such men are by their nature drawn rather near to women, and it would seem that they often feel a singular appreciation and understanding of the emotional needs and destinies of the other sex, leading in many cases to a genuine though what is called 'Platonic' friendship. There is little doubt that they are often instinctively sought after by women, who, without suspecting the real cause, are conscious of a sympathetic chord in the homogenic which they miss in the normal man.
Edward Carpenter
If you can do nothing else, do whatever is in your power to make the people in your life feel completely unashamed of who they are.
Sam Killermann
I dreamt we walked together along the shore. We made satisfying small talk and laughed. This morning I found sand in my shoe and a seashell in my pocket. Was I only dreaming?
Maya Angelou
My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges.
Helen Keller
A friend may be waiting behind a stranger's face.
Maya Angelou
This is how it works. I love the people in my life, and I do for my friends whatever they need me to do for them, again and again, as many times as is necessary. For example, in your case you always forgot who you are and how much you're loved. So what I do for you as your friend is remind you who you are and tell you how much I love you. And this isn't any kind of burden for me, because I love who you are very much. Every time I remind you, I get to remember with you, which is my pleasure.
James Lecesne
I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.
Helen Keller
Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.
Muhammad Ali
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
James Baldwin
People think that LGBTs adopting children will hurt them, but it's not being in loving homes that hurts children most.
DaShanne Stokes
What does love mean if we would deny it to others?
DaShanne Stokes
The power of love is that it sees all people.
DaShanne Stokes
The world could use more love. Why deny it to others?
DaShanne Stokes
Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.
Arundhati Roy