Quotes by Social Activists

Never explain, never retract, never apologize. Just get the thing done and let them howl.
Nellie L. McClung
When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat
Bell Hooks
Women who set a low value on themselves make life hard for all women.
Nellie McClung
Social science affirms that a woman's place in society marks the level of civilization.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
By nice women . . . you probably mean selfish women who have no more thought for the underprivileged overworked women than a pussycat in a sunny window for the starving kitten in the street. Now in that sense I am not a nice woman for I do care.
Nellie McClung
The economic dependence of women is perhaps the greatest injustice that has been done to us and has worked the greatest injury to the race.
Nellie McClung
All that I have accomplished ... has been by that plodding patient persevering process of accretion which builds the ant heap particle by particle thought by thought fact by fact.
Elihu Burritt
One of the greatest evils of the day among those outside of prison is their sense of futility. Young people say What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time take one step at a time we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.
Dorothy Day
There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Nature never repeats herself and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
This proves what a purifying effect women would have on politics.
Nellie McClung
Never retract never explain never apologize - get the thing done and let them howl.
Nellie McClung
Chivalry is a poor substitute for justice if one cannot have both. Chivalry is something like the icing on cake sweet but not nourishing.
Nellie McClung
This proves what a purifying effect women would have on politics.
Nellie McClung
Never retract never explain never apologize - get the thing done and let them howl.
Nellie McClung
Chivalry is a poor substitute for justice if one cannot have both. Chivalry is something like the icing on cake sweet but not nourishing.
Nellie McClung
Faith walks simply childlike between the darkness of human life and the hope of what is to come.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty
To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
Dorothy Day
It isn't easy to be the person who sometimes has to try to preserve your happiness at the expense of your fun.
Margaret Culkin Banning
It is the greatest shot of adrenaline to be doing what you've wanted to do so badly. You almost feel like you could fly without the plane.
Charles Lindbergh
I get a little angry about this highhanded scrapping of the look of things. What else have we to go by? How else can the average person form an opinion of a girl's sense of values or even of her chastity except by the looks of her conduct?
Margaret Culkin Banning
You wouldn't want to be caught wearing cheap perfume would you? Then why do you want to wear cheap perfume on your conduct?
Margaret Culkin Banning
The best protection any woman can have ... is courage.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Woman's discontent increases in exact proportion to her development.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Like many white liberals, Ken sees the “whiteness” of his social life as more an accident of circumstance than a choice. He would welcome greater diversity in the neighbourhood. However, he does not consciously do enough work either in his social life or in the larger community to make that diversity possible.
Bell Hooks
Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
Bell Hooks
One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..
Bell Hooks
I've spent a lifetime in challenge. There's no way in which you can create any meaningful change unless you do that.
Bella Abzug
There was no attack on religion because people were generally indifferent to religion. They were neither hot nor cold. They were the tepid, the materialistic, who hoped that by Sunday churchgoing they would be taking care of the afterlife, if there were an afterlife. Meanwhile they would get everything they could in this.
Dorothy Day
..the struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.
Bell Hooks
Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed
Bell Hooks
I want to say a word to the Brahmins: In the name of God, religion, sastras you have duped us. We were the ruling people. Stop this life of cheating us from this year. Give room for rationalism and humanism.
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
Why should anyone, in the name of caste, be considered lowly or be made to do a mean job?. If all in the country are given education, can there exist a caste for doing mean work? It is not because of lack of education that those people are constrained to do contemptible work and are considered lowly?
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
Women in India experience much worse suffering, humiliation and slavery in all spheres than even the untouchables.
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack that we have to cover up.
Bell Hooks
There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.
Dorothy Day
Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation.
Bell Hooks
When we are loving, we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.
Bell Hooks
The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love.
Bell Hooks
We freeze up because we expect a certain result or because we want things to be perfect.
Bernie Glassman
Everything a baptized person does every day should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.
Dorothy Day
She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political--for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)
Bell Hooks
Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she’s a woman. We know she’s a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.
Bell Hooks
…“white supremacy” is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force (i.e slavery, apartheid) than the term “internalized racism”- a term most often used to suggest that black people have absorbed negative feelings and attitudes about blackness. The term “white supremacy” enables us to recognize not only that black people are socialized to embody the values and attitudes of white supremacy, but we can exercise “white supremacist control” over other black people.
Bell Hooks
Concurrently, the growing class power and public voice of conservative and liberal well-to-do black folks easily obscures the class cruelty these individuals enact both in the way they talk about underprivileged blacks and the way they represent them. The existence of that class cruelty and its fascist dimensions have been somewhat highlighted by the efforts of privileged-class blacks to censor the voices of black youth, particularly gangsta rappers who are opposing bourgeois class values by extolling the values of street culture and street vernacular. Significantly, the attack on urban underclass black youth culture and its gangster dimensions (glamorization of crime, etc.) is usually presented via a critique of sexism. Since most privileged-class blacks have shown no interest in advancing feminist politics, the only organized effort to end sexism and sexist oppression, this attack on sexism seems merely gratuitous, a smoke screen that deflects away from the fact that what really disturbs bourgeois folks is the support of rebellion, unruly behavior, and disrespect for their class values. In reality, they and their white counterparts fear the power these young folks have to change the minds and life choices of youth from privileged classes. If only underclass black folks were listening to gangsta rap, there would be no public effort to silence and censor this music. The fear is that it will generate class rebellion.
Bell Hooks
Addiction makes love impossible.
Bell Hooks
To critique sexist images without offering alternatives is an incomplete intervention. Critique in and of itself does not lead to change.
Bell Hooks
Love is an exchange of gifts,' Saint Ignatius had said. It was in these simple, practical, down-to-earth ways that people could show their love for each other. If the love was not there in the beginning, but only the need, such gifts made love grow.
Dorothy Day
We are communities in time and in a place, I know, but we are communities in faith as well - and sometimes time can stop shadowing us. Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we hope that our lives will mean something to people who won't be alive until centuries from now. It's a great "chain of being," someone once told me, and I think our job is to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of the chain connected, unbroken. Our arms are linked - we try to be neighbors of His, and to speak up for his principles. That's a lifetime's job.
Dorothy Day
I think the invitation offered the non-black reader is to join us in this expression of our familiarity and via that joining, come to understand that when black people come together to celebrate and rejoice in black critical thinking, we do so not to exclude or to separate, but to participate more fully in world community. However, we must first be able to dialogue with one another, to give one another subject-to-subject recognition that is an act of resistance that is part of the decolonizing, anti-racist process.
Bell Hooks
All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like..I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice.
Bell Hooks
To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.
Bell Hooks
To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Think of the inconvenience of vanishing as it were from your friends and, correspondents three times in one's natural life.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing...
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
sometimes falling raincarries memories of betrayalthere in the woodswhere she was not meant to betoo young she believesin her right to be freein her bodyfree from harmbelieving naturea wilderness she can enterbe solacedbelieving the powerthat there be sacred placethat there can be atonement nowshe returns with no fearfacing the pastready to riskknowing these woods nowhold beauty and danger
Bell Hooks
Usually, fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, or any faith, shape and interpret religious thought to make it conform to and legitimize a conservative status quo. Fundamentalist thinkers use religion to justify supporting imperialism, militarism, sexism, racism, homophobia. They deny the message of love that is at the heart of every major religious tradition.
Bell Hooks