Best 433 quotes in «activism quotes» category

On reflection, most of us recognize that we would rather protect citizens than corporations—human rights rather than corporate capitalism. On reflection, most of us recognize that anymal advocates who defend life against exploitative industries hold the high moral ground—their compassionate motivation and social justice actions are supported by core teachings in every major religion. Anymal liberationists demonstrate self-sacrificing service on behalf of the exploited. They risk long-term imprisonment on behalf of the defenseless and downtrodden, the maimed and condemned. Those who take core religious teachings seriously will respect anymal liberationists because these dedicated activists treasure life above property and profits, and risk their freedom on behalf of those who cannot help themselves. Anymal liberationists exemplify religious commitment in action, most notably compassionate, self-sacrificing service to those who are most in need.

Oppressions are linked. We cannot free human beings without freeing cows, sows, and hens along with women and men who are systematically oppressed by those in power. Rather than seek to fight our way up the patriarchal ladder, those working for social justice need to dismantle hierarchies, and cease to exploit all those who are less powerful—even if we must give up a few culinary favorites in the process . . . . Each of us decides, over the course of our daily lives, whether we will ignore the suffering of nonhuman animals . . . . We choose where our money goes, and in the process, we choose whether to boycott cruelty and support change, or melt ambiguously back into the masses.

Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production.

Our ailing planet needs spiritual warriors, ones capable of standing up to the Western materialism machine, so we can create sustainable societies that care for their citizens, harmonize with the cycles of nature, and receive and honor the vast healing light that quietly connects us all.

Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.

Our individual power to effect change may not seem like much, but remember, we are all interconnected: We are One. Powerlessness itself is an illusion. Every positive action we take, no matter how small, will have an impact.

Our intellectual habit is to find the One Cause, our scientific programming is to measure it, and our political gearing is to attack it. When the One Cause is global, we cross our fingers and hand over responsibility and power to distant global institutions. They'll take care of it. We hope. But too often, blaming climate change means not doing anything at all.

Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations.

Our world needs more love, more acceptance, more generosity, more compassion. Justice is a struggle. Don't be disheartened. Don't give up.

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

Pay equality is not going to happen because we scream and yell about it, it's going to happen when we start demanding it." (On Beauty: Susan Sarandon, Vogue, January 8, 2016)

People don't move into action because of statistics. They move because of their hearts. We're hardwired with empathy neurons, billions of them, and human beings are evolutionarily programmed to help one another.

Poésie, philosophie et théologie naissent de l'affrontement lucide à l'injustifiable qu'aucune action ne saurait définitivement éliminer.

Poets can't march in protest or do that sort of thing. I feel that's against the rules, and pointless. If mankind wants a great big final bang, that's what it'll get. One should never protest against anything unless it's going to have an effect. None of those marches do. One should either be silent or go straight to the top.

Poetry wakes us up

Please your mother: just lie around upstairs and smoke some pot. Be a revolutionary.

Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians.

Resistance is more than a battle; it is the indomitable presence of life against forces of destruction.

Punishment is not something inflicted by the good upon the bad, but rather by the powerful upon the powerless.

Resistance is singing your grandmother's songs so the next generation will know them.

Reuse is the original green collar job.

Respecting the humanity of our opposition - who are our fellow citizens whether we approve of their actions or not - requires a depth of fearlessness far beyond the tactics of dehumanization and attacking.

Roots, he wrote, symbolize more than underground strong-arms. Roots are also origins, the tendrils of a sprouting seed that give rise to life.

Silence of dissent creates change at the behest of those who do not stay silent.

She is of the race of Jeanne d’Arc, this Northern girl, in her voice, her bearing, her beliefs. That kind if not to be possessed by one man; she belongs to a cause, to the people.

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.

Sadly, we live in a world where if you do good things, there are no financial rewards. If you poison the earth, there is a fortune to be made.

...she was something more- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face. It was a most painful position for at the same time Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement;...

Social justice activists in general, and animal advocates in particular, must work to expose the injustices they have learned to see . . . . To correct social problems, we must expose them to the light of day.

So I think that a protest,' she went on, 'like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protestor for the protestor.' She saw I was about to interrupt so said, 'One more minute. Let me explain. Of course one hopes and plans for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn't be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protestor it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protestor, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.

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

Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible.

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

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

Still, it becomes clearer every day that organizing or joining massive protests and demanding new policies fail to sufficiently address the crisis we face. They may demonstrate that we are on the right side politically, but they are not transformative enough. They do not change the cultural images or the symbols that play such a pivotal role in molding us into who we are.

Static people love to compensate for their inability to change themselves by always trying to change the world.

Stop listening to the TV tell you about America the beautiful . . . get up and be America the beautiful.

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.

(...) Taking the journalist's vow of impartiality and objectivity was not unlike joining an order of monks and spending the rest of your life in a glass monastery - removed from the world of human affairs even as it continued to whirl around you on all sides. To be a journalist meant you could never be the person who tossed the brick through the window that started the revolution. You could only watch the man toss the brick, you could try to understand why he had tossed the brick, you could explain to others what significance the brick had in starting the revolution, but you yourself could never toss the brick or even stand in the mob that was urging the man to throw it.

Sulkowicz’s genius was to make her burden tangible, and in so doing make it something others could share. Solidarity has been a big part of this feminist movement against violence. (“An Insurrectionary Year”)

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

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.

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.

The activist path is not easy, but it is the only reasonable path for those who desire change.

The darkness of ignorance is allergic to the light of your truth. Speak your truth.

The biggest lesson is you get the country you work for. If you sit back and simply allow your country to be, it is highly unlikely to be the kind of country you want. You have to be active.

The day Speaker of the House Paul Ryan announced that he was going to do everything he could to repeal the Affordable Care Act and defund Planned Parenthood, [...] we saw a 900% increase in requests for appointments to get IUDs, a form of birth control that lasts for several years. Women wanted to make sure their birth control would outlast the [new] Administration.

The Earth was singing her revolution. She was calling her brave men and women to her defense.

The hour that was for them, for us, for all who had awakened one morning to see their fields covered with blood rather than harvest, who didn't seek to change the world but lived in good faith and prayer offered to an imposing God, for the young women who mended their men's clothing and held their sons' mouths to the purple nipples of sweet breasts, for the man who watched the suns descend behind the mountain every evening and dreamed and when his sons were grown, passed on his dreams, for the black nights when guitars harmonized with the wind's song, to the bottle of regional brew, and a hand-rolled cigarette, to the baptism and a dance of celebration, to the aroma of soups simmering on wood-burning stoves and filled the bellies of those who worked the fields, to a candle that burned in vigil while a hungry mind gulped the printed truth of another's legacy, to the owl that called from between the moon and earth while lovers enwrapped their passion on silver tinted grass, to the history of the world and to its future, to all that had lived and died and had been born again in that moment as i approached am opaque window and pointed my weapon.

The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through the police, carnivorous landlords, and the welfare system.