Activism Quotes - Page 6

I am political in spite of myself. I don't want to do the things I know I have to do, don't want to expose myself to disapproval, to retribution, don't want to go to meetings and demonstrations, distribute leaflets, don't want to ask people for signatures, for money. I don't do these things as naturally as I breathe, the way I imagine real political people do, real communists, real socialists and feminists, real radicals, real troublemakers, real champions of the people. I do them because I know I've got to, because I am convinced it's the only way to make changes, to stop abuses. I do them almost as a last resort. I do them because I've been putting off doing them, avoiding them for months, because finally the necessity has gripped me and overcome my reluctance, my desire for the warmth of my room, for my books, for my people, for the reassurance of my homely habits.

Rosario Morales

We write history with our feet and with our presece and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.

Rebecca Solnit

The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.

Christopher Hitchens

The speaker calls for a careful examination of Christ's principle of turning the other cheek before we use it as a demand or excuse for total personal pacifism. After all, when literally struck on the cheek, Jesus did question the legitimacy of the authority by which this was done.

John Thackway

If Paul Revere had been a modern day citizen, he wouldn't have ridden down Main Street. He would have tweeted.

Alec Ross

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

Frederick Douglass

All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.

Şeyla Benhabib

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

Tariq Ali

What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.

Christopher Hitchens

If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.

Joseph Sobran

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

Terry Eagleton

If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist.

Jenny Holzer

A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

Barack Obama

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

To retain our dignity, we must sometimes refuse to live life at any cost

Dario Spini

Examples of goodness that know no ethnic, religious, racial, or political bounds are important documents of war, as they also represent an axis around which a healthy future can be constructed after the atrocities have halted.

Dario Spini

During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In all our human squabbles, threats of nuclear war, denying climate change, we hardly stop to think of the trees that bend in the wind, the bird that feeds it's young, and the elephants bedding down for the night as we toy with the destruction of this gift given to them.

Eileen Anglin

Let my silence grow with noise as pregnant mothers grow with life. Let my silence permeate these walls as sunlight permeates a home. Let the silence rise from unwatered graves and craters left by bombs. Let the silence rise from empty bellies and surge from broken hearts. The silence of the hidden and forgotten. The silence of the abused and tortured. The silence of the persecuted and imprisoned. The silence of the hanged and massacred. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so the hungry may eat my words and the poor may wear my words. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so I may resurrect the dead and give voice to the oppressed. My silence speaks.

Kamand Kojouri

Best to live and love by the maxim that 'silence in the face of evil is evil itself', but when it's evil fighting evil, let evil kill itself.

Criss Jami

War...is ugly and brutalizing, and the nobility is in doing it without becoming ugly and brutalizing.

Dana Kramer-Rolls

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

Pain makes people warriors, you just have to hurt enough!

Mary-Ellen Peters

Real women fight for something, other than their own emotions.

Shannon L. Alder

Our work is not about transcending this world to get to a better place; our work is to be fully present here; to heal ourselves, and our planet in the spirit of service and compassion.

Eileen Anglin

I don't think that God says, "Go to church and pray all day and everything will be fine." No. For me God says, "Go out and make the changes that need to be made, and I'll be there to help you.

Elvia Alvarado

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

To say nothing is saying something. You must denounce things you are against or one might believe that you support things you really do not.

Germany Kent

Darkness seems to have prevailed and has taken the forefront. This country as in the 'cooperation' of The United States of America has never been about the true higher-good of the people. Know and remember this.Cling to your faith.Roll your spiritual sleeves up and get to work. Use your energy wisely. Transmute all anger, panic and fear into light and empowerment.Don't use what fuels them; all lower-energy.Mourn as you need to. Console who you need to—and then go get into the spiritual and energetic arena. There's plenty work for us to do; within and without.Let's each focus on becoming 'The President of Our Own Life.Cultivate your mind. Pursue your purpose. Shine your light. Elevate past—and reject—any culture of low vibrational energy and ratchetness. Don't take fear, defeat or anger—on or in.The system is doing what they've been created to do.Are you? Am I? Are we—collectively?Let's get to work.No more drifting through life without your higher-self in complete control of your mind.Awaken—fully. Activate—now. Put your frustrations or concerns into your work.Don't lose sight. There is still—a higher plan.Let's ride this 4 year energetic-wave like the spiritual gangsters that we are.This will all be the past soon. Let's get to work and stay dedicated, consistent and diligent. Again, this will all be the past soon. We have preparing and work to do.Toxic energy is so not a game.Toxic energy and low vibrations are being collectively acted out on the world stage.Covertly operating through the unconscious weak spots and blind spots in the human psyche; making people oblivious to their own madness, causing and influencing them to act against–their–own–best–interests and higher-good, as if under a spell and unconsciously possessed. This means that they are actually nourishing the lower vibrational energy with their lifestyle, choices, energy and habits, which is unconsciously giving the lower-energy the very power and fuel it needs—for repeating and recreating endless drama, suffering and destruction, in more and more amplified forms on a national and world stage.So what do we do? We take away its autonomy and power over us while at the same time empowering ourselves. By recognizing how this energetic/spiritual virus or parasite of the mind—operates through our unawareness is the beginning of the cure. Knowledge is power. Applied knowledge is—freedom.Our shared future will be decided primarily by the changes that take place in the psyche of humanity, starting with each of us— vibrationally.In closing and most importantly,the greatest protection against becoming affected or possessed by this lower-energy is to be in touch with our higher vibrational-self. We have to call our energy and power back. Being in touch with our higher-self and true nature acts as a sacred amulet, shielding and protecting us from the attempted effects. We defeat evil not by fighting against it (in which case, by playing its game, we’ve already lost) but by getting in touch with the part of us that is invulnerable to its effects— our higher vibrational-self.Will this defeat and destroy us?Or will it awaken us more and more?Everything depends upon our recognizing what is being revealed to us and our stepping out of the unconscious influence of low vibrational/negative/toxic/evil/distraction energy (or whatever name you relate to it as)that is and has been seeking power over each of our lives energetically and/or spiritually, and step into our wholeness, our personal power, our higher self and vibrate higher and higher daily.Stay woke my friends—let's get to work.

Lalah Delia

An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary in 2016 is irrelevant.An African American Studies class that is not inherently revolutionary in 2016 is irrelevant.

Darnell Lamont Walker

[I]t takes so little effort and money to get rid of malaria, to bring in clean water, to give people a chance at an education. When you don't have hope, that's when people start to do weird, horrible, violent things. That's at the bottom of it. It's just a question of prioritizing. The funds are t

Susan Sarandon

Museum education has the power and the responsibility to do the challenging inner work of tackling tough topics and turning them into teachable moments.

Monica O Montgomery

An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment.

Anthony Standen

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

Leonardo da Vinci

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

Nick Cohen

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue.

Edmund White

The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.

Leonard Bernstein

You do it for yourself. You don’t expect to change the world. You don’t even expect to influence your family or your friends. You do it because you can’t not do it and be who you are. Or who you’re meant to be.

Martin Sheen

There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning!

Abbie Hoffman

Most good things have already been said far too many times and just need to be lived.

Shane Claiborne

Your politics are so far right,They're wrong.

Harry Whitewolf

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

Rebecca Solnit

History has seen many who claim to be deliverer and saviour of the people. They might come with force and violence and parade their might and splendour as conquerors. The pharaohs of Egypt, Sennacherib king of Assyria, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, Darius of Persia, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Napoleon, Clive of India, Bismarck, the Kaiser, Hitler, Stalin. The story and scene is always the same. They claim to deliver the people from bondage and to establish justice, freedom and peace. They come in might, riding in splendour, dragging prisoners.

John Myer

The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection...

Rebecca Solnit

For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...

Rebecca Solnit

I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...

Rebecca Solnit

We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.

Rebecca Solnit

Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change.

Rebecca Solnit

What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.

Rebecca Solnit

You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center.

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

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

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

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Activism Quotes - Page 6

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