Activism Quotes - Page 5

Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.

Theodore J. Kaczynski

It is the nature of physics to hear the loudest of mouths over the most comprehensive ones.

Criss Jami

Everyone is so locked into the current way of doing things, they never see the larger picture or other, more responsible and efficient possibilities. A REAL economy is always wanting to limit consumption/manufacturing as much as possible by assuring the strategically "best" and "adaptable" productions at all times, while keeping balance with human needs and public health.It is a total shift in intent than what we have today.

Peter Joseph

I believe the era of the militant lady is back.

Sara Sheridan

The academic and writer Sara Ahmed has written brilliantly about the idea of the feminist killjoy, and why it should be embraced – because feminism isn’t about making everyone around the table feel comfortable. It’s about being disruptive, challenging, and changing the terms of the debate, so that, over time, almost certainly with discomfort and backlash, everyone becomes freer.

Kira Cochrane

Julia supposed that there was also a difference in perspective: 'The practical level was another level down [in 1960s social movements] and not so interesting. I don't know much about organizing, but I feel as though, if the reality of the situation doesn't change people's heads, then nothing's going to change their heads. Marches and those things are not the work of it. The work of it is whatever the work is.

Laura Kaplan

My activism does not need proof to be real. It exists in the work of my bones against weight in the morning.

Amandla Stenberg

Being a feminist in principle is easy compared to being a feminist in practice. For men and women, living each day in practical defiance of thousands of years of gender-based streaming is so much harder than walking in marches, running workshops, and writing blog posts. It means questioning everything you do, moment by moment, day by day. It means thinking differently and making dozens of conscious decisions every day that you might have made on auto-pilot before. It's hard. It's taxing. It's tiring.

Terry Fallis

She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right.

Margaret Atwood

I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.

Dorothy Allison

It's actually such a tragedy that I live in a world that is inspired by me putting my body or mental state on the line

Malebo Sephodi

The 1970s-80s social movement called U.S. third world feminism functioned as a central locus of possibility, an insurgent social movement that shattered the construction of any one ideology as the single most correct site where truth can be represented. Indeed, without making this kind of metamove, any 'liberation' or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself, and become trapped inside a drive for truth that ends only in producing its own brand of dominations. What U.S. third world feminism thus demanded was a new subjectivity, a political revision that denied any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical subjectivity with the capactiy to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved. These dynamics are what were required in the shift from enacting a hegemonic oppositional theory and practice to engaging in the differential form of social movement, as performed by U.S. feminists of color during the post-World War II period of great social transformation. p. 58-59.

Chela Sandoval

What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial...[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick.

Betty Friedan

There was something distinctly American about it all, a fundamental difference in perspective and place–in how they saw themselves in the world. And this was what made it so American–not that they felt compassion for mistreated workers three continents away, workers they had never seen or known, whose world they could not begin to understand, not that they felt guilty about their privilege, no,no not that either, but that they felt the need to do something. That they felt they had to power to do something about it. That was what made it so American. That they felt they had the power to do something–they assumed they had that power. They had been born with it–the ability to change the world–and had never questioned its existence, an assumption so massive as to remain unseen. The power and the responsibility to protect the people they imagined as powerless. The poor defenseless people of the Third World. He felts a sudden queasy sadness. What if they knew what a real revolutionary was? How bloody a real revolution. He looked around, suddenly feeling the need to sit, and saw nothing but their faces, their round wet faces staring back at him. What a violence of spirit not to know the world.

Sunil Yapa

To reform the world - means to reform upbringing...

Janusz Korczak

I would like to say to the men and women of the generations which will come after us: you will look back at us with astonishment. You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished so little, at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did not take. At the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you we sat down passive. At the great truths staring us in the face which we failed to see, at the great truths we grasped at but could not get our fingers quite 'round. You will marvel at the labour that ended in so little. But what you will never know that it was how we were thinking of you and for you that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little that we have done. That it was in the thought of your larger realization and fuller life that we have found consolation for the futilities of our own. All I aspire to be and was not, comforts me.

Olive Schreiner

It takes a female to have a baby,It takes a woman to raise a child,It takes a mother to raise them correctly,It takes a warrior to show them how to change the world.

Shannon L. Alder

Our soul longs to be of service in some way. It's why we are here. If you weren't meant to touch the world in some way, you wouldn't be here.What act of service calls to you? Even the smallest thing has an effect in eternity.

Eileen Anglin

The only real difficulty with becoming disciplined is when you buy into the notion that happiness comes at the price of sacrifice. The reality is this: Discipline becomes freedom when you are doing what you love.

Shannon L. Alder

Live in such a way that when you die you leave God in your will for your children.

Shannon L. Alder

God has a way of picking a “nobody” and turning their world upside down, in order to create a “somebody” that will remove the obstacles they encountered out of the pathway for others.

Shannon L. Alder

You might lose battles in your life time. However, every person that stands bravely on the side of justice, for people that have no voice, wins the true battle---Gods.

Shannon L. Alder

Dignity is never silent. It has a voice, heart and soul. Truth and courage is its foundation. It will stand against the masses and speak the truth. Because every great person has always done what others found fear in doing.

Shannon L. Alder

We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

Audre Lorde

The earth is hiring and the pay is your legacy.

Shannon L. Alder

We are not at the bargaining table in agreement to end abuse to our world. We are on the battlefield deciding everyday if we will let this world die or live, by how we contribute to its treatment.

Shannon L. Alder

The world is waiting for us to graduate from ourselves.

Shannon L. Alder

Is not the true respect and worship of God the exercising of our power in such a way that we are also respected?

Shannon L. Alder

They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds.

Dinos Christianopoulos

So often our power lies not in ourselves, but in how we help others find their own strength.

Amy Lee Peine

If I look at the mass I will never act.

Mother Teresa

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass

Where there is power, there is resistance.

Michel Foucault

Songs are dangerous, songs are subversive and can change your life.

Ronnie Gilbert

Stop praying for salvation when it is clear,You are the saviours that we need around here.

Harry Whitewolf

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

John Lennon

I can't bring myself to watch yet another video, not because I don't care, but because we're all just a few videos away from becoming completely desensitized. The public execution of Black folks will never be normal.

Andrena Sawyer

Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself.

Joss Whedon

If we truly believe in the power of cultural institutions to impact communities and engage authentically with social justice issues, if we believe in museums’ capacity to bring about social change, improve cultural awareness, and even transform the world, than we must also believe that our internal practices have an impact, and must act according to the changes we seek.

Monica O Montgomery

We often fear that the Revolution needed is too big for what we can give.Too much change is required inside, outside.And we are too small.But all that is required is that you step into the truth of your life. And speak it, write it, paint it, dance it.That you shine your light on your truth, for the world to see.And as hundreds, then thousands, then millions do this – each sparking the courage of yet more – Suddenly we have a world alight with truth.

Lucy H. Pearce

The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.

Anderson Cooper

The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.

Anderson Cooper

Mental illness is not a fraternity or a social club for like minds. It is its own religion to each person that has it. Their mind is their pastor, their feelings are their scriptures and their delusions are their own bible story. To break them free, is to break their faith in signs. That is why so many feel lost.

Shannon L. Alder

In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines.

Harold Cruse

[The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.

Edward Bond

Tensurrealism creates actual and non-compromised reality, jamboree, fervor, fascination, poetics of an active enthusiasm, interludium, lyrical practice, active happiness.

Lepota L. Cosmo

We sing lyrical excess, exacerbated expressionism, imponed objectivity,inventiveness, meta-baroque, extravaganza, super metaphor, sublimity, strident, exposure, super-pone, noise, super-objectivity, zillionism, fragmentation and aesthetics of facts, suractivism.

Lepota L. Cosmo

A critical element in nearly all effective social movements is leadership. For it is through smart, persistent, and authoritative leaders that a movement generates the appropriate concepts and language that captures the frustration, anger, or fear of the group's members and places responsibility where it is warranted.

David E. Wilkins

Love and Hate are two of the most used, abused, and misused words of mankind.

Tiffany Winfree

You can't stop Greatness; you can only try to delay it. And when you try to delay it, it just gets Greater because it gains new strength.

Tiffany Winfree

If a policy is wrongheaded feckless and corrupt I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.

David H. Hackworth

Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself.

Criss Jami

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

H.G.Wells

Pay equality is not going to happen because we scream and yell about it, it's going to happen when we start demandin

Susan Sarandon

It is important for women to do something about what they see.

Roma Tearne

Individual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts.

Bell Hooks

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

The goal of radicalism is to improve the human condition, not to prove one's own moral superiority.

Jack Newfield

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

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Activism Quotes - Page 5

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