Quotes by Activists - Page 84

The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it's a temporary and local place...
Rebecca Solnit
Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.
Rebecca Solnit
There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one's own virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that comes from pleasure denied. The bleakness of the world is required as contrasting backdrop to the drama of their rising above.
Rebecca Solnit
Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal...
Rebecca Solnit
Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.
Rebecca Solnit
The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden--which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution.
Rebecca Solnit
Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.
Rebecca Solnit
To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.
Rebecca Solnit
Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on the prize ahead. Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don’t need to or can’t go down it. You can. We have.
Rebecca Solnit
The darkest things of this world nestle inseparable from, and do not eclipse, its equally boundless graces and glories.
Brian Awehali
When we admit and deal with difference; when we deal with the deep bitterness; when we deal with the horror of even our different nightmares; when we turn them and look at them, it’s like looking at death: hard but possible. If you look at it directly without embracing it, then there is much less that you can ever be made to fear.
Audre Lorde
The rain begins with a single drop
Manal Al-Sharif
There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have . . .
Arundhati Roy
Something about Tilo’s new home reminded Musa of the story of Mumtaz Afzal Malik, the young taxi driver whom Amrik Singh had killed, whose body had been recovered from a field and delivered to his family with earth in his clenched fists and mustard flowers growing through his fingers. That story had always stayed with Musa – perhaps because of the way hope and grief were woven together in it, so tightly, so inextricably.
Arundhati Roy
Over time, I have come to believe that there is a killer and a saint in all of us. But...I choose to focus on the future and the *potential* in people.
Agnes Kamara-umunna
We must seek together to address the good aspirations of people everywhere, for we are bound together through great commonality.
Bryant McGill
Even a single lamp dispels the deepest darkness.
Mahatma Gandhi
...William Stegner...coined the term 'the geography of hope,' countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few actually entered it.
Rebecca Solnit
Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things... But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.
Helen Keller
Your emotional state has a tremendous amount to do with sickness, health and well-being. For years, my husband and I lived on -- and because of -- hope. Hope continues to give me the mental strength to carry on.
Dana Reeve
‎Now I think ultimately our hope is certainly that people can feel and taste the goodness of God and to find the salvation in Jesus's love and sacrifice. Sometimes the biggest barrier to that has been Christians and has been a Church that is numb to the poverty of the world or just sees our Christianity as a ticket into heaven while ignoring the hells of the world around us. And we're not willing to settle for that kind of Christianity. We believe in a kingdom that begins now and that the kingdom of God Jesus preached is not just something we're to go to when we die but that we're to bring down on earth as it is in heaven.
Shane Claiborne
The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.
Rebecca Solnit
It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me…if much has been denied me, much, very much, has been given me…
Helen Keller
Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.
Marian Wright Edelman
The greatest joys in life are found not only in what we do and feel, but also in our quiet hopes and labors for others.
Bryant McGill
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Rebecca Solnit
Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change.
Paul Rogat Loeb
May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.
Nelson Mandela
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy
One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.
Malala Yousafzai
I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.
Nelson Mandela
She closed her eyes briefly, feeling sick. Olivia had experienced strangulation before. Having to look directly into the face of the person who was killing you made the experience beyond awful. But there were worse things than that. Staring into the void of unresolved memory, living an eternal mystery, waking up night after night seeing the face of someone you desperately wanted to save but having not the slightest clue how to do it—all that was worse. If going through with this experience gave her the answers she needed, if it gave her peace, it would be well worth one-hundred-and-thirty seconds of fear and pain.
Leslie Parrish
How many more times would I have embraced him that night, how many more times would I have kissed him, if I had known the name of that stranger lover who was already in Montreal, who had already bought his stadium ticket from a scalper for the 5,000 tomorrow. That implacable lover who was going to turn Billy's eyes away from me forever.
Patricia Nell Warren
In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.
Edward Carpenter
He was with me, beside me, inside me, and I did not care that my children were asleep, alone at home, or that the neighbors might come to know. He burned the fear out of me until all was left was desire.
Ru Freeman
[A]s people are beginning to see that the sexes form in a certain sense a continuous group, so they are beginning to see that Love and Friendship which have been so often set apart from each other as things distinct are in reality closely related and shade imperceptibly into each other. Women are beginning to demand that Marriage shall mean Friendship as well as Passion; that a comrade-like Equality shall be included in the word Love; and it is recognised that from the one extreme of a 'Platonic' friendship (generally between persons of the same sex) up to the other extreme of passionate love (generally between persons of opposite sex) no hard and fast line can at any point be drawn effectively separating the different kinds of attachment. We know, in fact, of Friendships so romantic in sentiment that they verge into love; we know of Loves so intellectual and spiritual that they hardly dwell in the sphere of Passion.
Edward Carpenter
Would you believe I was in the neighborhood?”“No."“Well, how about that I needed to see you.”“Why? Did one of my neighbors call and say my cat’s been stalking their bunny?”One corner of his mouth went up. “You know, that sounds like a euphemism. A kind of salacious one”“Ooh, big words for Mr. Average Joe street cop,” she said, knowing she sounded bitchy but unable to help it. “Can you take out the angry eyes, Mrs. Potato Head, and just let me talk to you?
Leslie Parrish
The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.
Arundhati Roy
Laten we op zoek gaan naar 'vreugde' in plaats van naar eerlijk voedsel en schone lucht en een gezondere toekomst op een bewoonbare planeet! Alsof geluk volstaat om ons te beschermen tegen de gevolgen van winst-waanzin.
Audre Lorde
Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product. attr to Buthan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck
John Robbins
Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow.
Helen Keller
Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invicible host against difficulties.
Helen Keller
Ladies, stress shows on your face. Happiness is the true beauty weapon." ( Kym Douglas / Cindy Pearlman, 2006)
Susan Sarandon
How can you tell somebody who is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?
Dan Savage
Remember laughing? Laughter enhances the blood flow to the body’s extremities and improves cardiovascular function. Laughter releases endorphins and other natural mood elevating and pain-killing chemicals, improves the transfer of oxygen and nutrients to internal organs. Laughter boosts the immune system and helps the body fight off disease, cancer cells as well as viral, bacterial and other infections. Being happy is the best cure of all diseases!
Patch Adams
The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.
Dan Savage
Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'One grand boulevard with treeswith one grand cafe in sunwith strong black coffee in very small cups.One not necessarily very beautifulman or woman who loves you.One fine day.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi
If your actions don't live up to your words, you have nothing to say.
DaShanne Stokes
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
Helen Keller
Locating friendship at the heart of mission involves certain assumptions -- that reconciliation with God is something for which every human being is made and relationships are reciprocal.
Christopher Heuertz
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James Baldwin
Your success and happiness lie in you.
Helen Keller
The Futures Bright, Wear Your Sunglasses
Ian Somerhalder
I am not an optimist, but a great believer of hope.
Nelson Mandela
To those who are given much, much is expected.
Maya Angelou
No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.
Maya Angelou
My Life is My Message
Mahatma Gandhi
All the things that are worth doing, take time.
Mos Def
Your crown has been bought and paid for. Put it on your head and wear it.
Maya Angelou