Best 372 quotes in «social justice quotes» category

Second, resistance defies claims of a single American way; and reminds us that there are many American ways, often conflicting and sometimes deceiving. This is particularly true of resistance movements themselves; splintered by nature, the small and vital acts of resistance, often those of a single person, have their own sources of inspiration. They follow a different timeline in everyone’s life. At their best, resistance movements flow like many rivers into an ocean or historic water- shed event.

Selflessness was a lonely world

Similar reasoning has promoted educational policies which seek to create more equal outcomes for "special education" students with mental, physical, or psychological handicaps—again with little or no regard for the financial costs of this to the taxpayers or the educational costs to other children in whose classrooms they are to be "mainstreamed," often with little regard to the disruptive effects of their special needs. These financial costs can be several times what it costs to educate the average student, while the educational results for a severely retarded student may be imperceptible. The educational cost can also include a substantial part of a teacher's time being devoted to one or a few students, to the neglect of the majority.

Seek justice: Make a commitment to serve the needs of the ‘least of these’ and give voice to the voiceless.

Serve others: The heart of the leader is manifested through service to others.

She’d never put words to it, but she believed most humans wanted laws—to feel safe from people with the wrong amount of money, the wrong color skin, the wrong religion or thoughts or words, and so they begged for them. They worshipped laws, because laws were how they puffed themselves up and pushed their foes into the mud. In one blink of Ryn’s eye, though, the laws turned around like tigers and mauled the ones who made them. It was idiotic, and she felt bad for Naomi’s father, because he had a principle; but there weren’t many like him. Most of their kind loved flags. Most deserved to choke on them.

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.

Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair.

Some of the most unrecognized ministries are my favorite kind. Like the ministry of playing video games with awkward adolescent boys. The ministry of bringing takeout food to people whose baby is very sick in the hospital. The ministry of picking up empty chip wrappers at the park. The ministry of sending postcards. The ministry of sitting in silence with someone in the psych ward. The ministry of sending hilarious and inspirational text messages. The ministry of washing dishes without being asked. The ministry of flower gardening. The ministry of not laughing at teenagers when they talk about their relationship crises. The ministry of making an excellent cup of coffee. The ministry of drinking a terrible cup of coffee with a bright smile. The ministry of noticing beauty everywhere - in fabrics, in art, and in the wilderness.

Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.

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.

Sitting on the sidelines in our interconnected world is not a sufficient response.

Sir, — Whether women are the equals of men has been endlessly debated; whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to ask [for a definitive acknowledgement that at least they are animals?… Many hon. members may object to the proposed Bill enacting that, in statutes respecting the suffrage, 'wherever words occur which import the masculine gender they shall be held to include women;' but could any object to the insertion of a clause in another Act that 'whenever the word "animal" occur it shall be held to include women?' Suffer me, thorough your columns, to appeal to our 650 [parliamentary] representatives, and ask — Is there not one among you then who will introduce such a motion? There would then be at least an equal interdict on wanton barbarity to cat, dog, or woman… Yours respectfully, AN EARNEST ENGLISHWOMAN

Stand for love. Social justice is everyone’s responsibility.

The act of claiming an identity can be transformational. It can provide healing and empowerment. It can weld solidarity within a community. And, perhaps most importantly, it can diminish power from an oppressor, a dominant group.

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

Suppression of progress plays into the hands of the social enemy. Every advance in social justice establishes the nation.

The bow in hand, he finally staggered up and glanced down the alley, obviously searching for whoever had – what had he said? – ‘called’ him? Though he didn’t look much taller than her, the vast array of weapons – enough to fight a whole troop of French soldiers – was terrifying and slightly ridiculous. Like what a little boy might don to pretend to be some ancient warrior. A warrior. Oh, by the Most High… He was looking for her. Nahri was the one who had called him.

The call for justice was a protest as fierce as those of the biblical prophets and of Jesus, and the similarity of the call was no coincidence. As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. Its protest of inequity would be an integral part of the demand for inclusiveness, for unity and equality under the umbrella of the one god regardless of lineage, wealth, age, or gender. This is what would make it so appealing to the disenfranchised, those who didn't matter in the grand Meccan scheme of things, like slaves and freedmen, widows and orphans, all those cut out of the elite by birth or circumstance. And it spoke equally to the young and idealistic, those who had not yet learned to knuckle under to the way things were and who responded to the deeply egalitarian strain of the verses. All were equal before God, the thirteen-year-old Ali as important as the most respected graybeard, the daughter as much as the son, the African slave as much as the highborn noble. It was a potent and potentially radical re-envisioning of society. This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.

The church wanted us to give out food to malnourished children, but they didn't want us to question why they were malnourished to begin with.

The colonists, the aid workers, the NGOs -- they're all in a single progression: paternalistic foreigners, assuming they are better and brighter, offering shiny, destabilizing, dependence producing gifts. How can one accept anything from so-called rescuers when their predecessors helped your people destroy one another?

​The defence of the principle of true justice will entail denouncing what is today continually promoted as ‘social justice’, a justice that serves only the lowest classes of society (the so-called ‘working classes’) and works to the detriment of other classes, effectively leading to injustice. The true state will also be hierarchical, especially because it will be able to acknowledge and create respect for the hierarchy of true values, giving primacy to values of a higher order, not material or utilitarian ones, and admitting relevant, legitimate inequalities or differences of social positions, opportunities and dignity. The true state will reject as aberrant the formula of the state of labour, whether or not this state is presented as ‘national’.​

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

The Church risks irrelevance when it makes central God's preference for the poor and not His universal favor toward the poor in spirit.

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

The gospel Jesus spreads in the book of Luke has as one of its main themes that Jesus brings a social revolution, in which the previous systems and hierarchies of clean and unclean, sinner and saved, and up and down don't mean what they used to. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of the God who shows no favouritism. To reject this new social order was to reject Jesus, the very movement of God in flesh and blood.

The idea of reappropriation isn’t a new one. The process of turning negative words, symbols, or ideas into positive parts of our own identity – was used for social justice movements long before hipsters thought that being ironic was cool. Whether it is repurposing a racial epithet or taking on a stereotype for sociopolitical empowerment, it’s an important process that has been around for thousands of years and continues to change society today.

The fight for truth...is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth.

The list of what righteousness does is a list of things that most people would want: it delivers from death (see Proverbs 11:4); gives life (see Proverbs 12:28); exalts a nation (see Proverbs 14:34); establishes the king’s throne (see Proverbs 16:12); and brings blessings (see Psalm 106:3), rewards (see Proverbs 11:18), and peace (see Isaiah 32:17).

The incredible women around the world who do stand up for justice can in fact transform the planet.

The Margaret Thatcher syndrome, that is, the woman who achieves seniority, but refuses any gender identification and indeed whose policies harmed many women, highlights that gender sensitivity is more significant in leading change than the biological sex of post-holders.

The more ardently I see humanity as a glorious abstract that must conform to my ideal of how the world should be, the harder it is for me to love the person on the other side of the picket line who is holding up progress. I can love the downtrodden in the abstract, but as I shivered under the bridge that night with Jorge, I realized that it's harder to love the illegal immigrant with the bottle-slashed face and the body unwashed for weeks, the workers gathering to eat day-old bread and chicken and rice out of foam containers, the crowd of thousands clamoring for bread and fish and healing, the unclean woman hoping to touch the hem of the Savior's robe.

The members of the functional and socially mobilized under class must, in some very real way, be seen as the architects of their own fate. If not, they could be, however marginally, on the conscience of the comfortable. There could be a disturbing feeling, however fleeting, of unease, even guilt.

The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us—poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction—where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.

…the narratives we tell to justify a single set of laws and stakes are inherently unjust.

The essence of economic inequality is borne out in a simple fact: there are 400 billionaires in the United States and 45 million people living in poverty. These are not parallel facts; they are intersecting facts. There are 400 American billionaires because there are 45 million people living in poverty. Profit comes at the expense of the living wage. Corporate executives, university presidents, and capitalists in general are living the good life--because so many others are living a life of hardship.

The oppressor is solidary wit the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor -- when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.

The Pike is the meanest and most vicious of fresh-water fishes. This is caused by heredity and environment, or unfortunate social conditions in the water.

The politicians throw dirt at each other, the citizens throw dirt at the politicians, so everybody is living in dirt. If you want things to change, then stop throwing dirt and act, whether you are a politician, a civil servant or a civilian.

The point here is not that emissions don't matter. It is a call for a shift in priorities. On the policy level, we need to shift toward protecting and healing ecosystems on every level, especially the local. On a cultural level, we need to reintegrate human life with the rest of life, and bring ecological principles to bear on social healing. On the level of strategy and thought, we need to shift the narrative toward life, love, place, and participation. Even if we abandoned the emissions narrative, if we do these things emissions will surely fall as well.

The realization of dreams, like every battle for freedom, has always required compromise to one degree or another. When the result of a concession, however, is the mutilation of your soul or the cancellation of someone else's future, then it may be said the desired goal was corrupted or destroyed rather than attained.

There are times when so much talk or writing, so many ideas seem to stand in the way, to block the awareness that for the oppressed, the exploited, the dominated, domination is not just a subject for radical discourse, for books. It is about pain – the pain of hunger, the pain of over-work, the pain of degradation and dehumanization, the pain of loneliness, the pain of loss, the pain of isolation, the pain of exile... Even before the words, we remember the pain.

There are times when relationships need to be prioritised over what is right. And there are times when the right needs to be prioritised over relationships.

There is a great new work before us, which is to replace with true knowledge the ignorance that has destroyed human minds. We will construct unity in a world [which] has been brutally torn apart by false divisions of race, religion, gender, nationality, and age. We will heal with unconditional love those souls whose hearts have been disfigured by hatred and loneliness.

There is no other industry as cruel and oppressive as factory farming. With regard to numbers affected, extent and length of suffering, and numbers of premature deaths, no other industry can even approach factory farming. Billions of individuals are exploited from genetically engineered birth, through excruciating confinement, to conveyor belt dismemberment. Consequently, there is no industry more appropriate for social justice activists to boycott.

There is nothing truthful, wise, humane, or strategic about confusing hostility to injustice and oppression, which is leftist, with hostility to science and rationality, which is nonsense.

There is no doubt that the biblical concept of the Kingdom calls for a ministry to the suffering, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the hungry and whomever is dehumanized by an unjust society. In abstract, almost all of us can affirm this with enthusiasm. When it is the vocation, however, of one of our number to make this Gospel imperative, a matter demanding and requiring us to change our comfortable ways, then many of us fall away. The prophet has never been popular among his other contemporaries. He has been stoned, beheaded, crucified and shot. If not killed, we have been all too ready to vilify him or her in the name of God, little realizing that it may well be God who sent the prophet to challenge our complacency.

The same patriarchy that oppresses women oppresses nonhuman animals. Farmed animals and “housewives,” “lab” animals and prostitutes, dancing bears and girls in the sex trade—all have too long been exploited by the same patriarchal hierarchy wherein the comparatively weak are exploited for the benefit of the powerful. Those who are aware of history, of patriarchy and of the feminist movement, tend to understand how difficult it is—and how important—for people to rethink basic behaviors in order to bring about deep and lasting change. We must rethink how we speak, how we spend our time, and what we consume. This is as true for fighting sexism as it is for fighting speciesism—or any other form of domination, exploitation, and oppression. We must change our lives first, and most fundamentally. I hope that readers working to improve the lives of girls and women . . . will realize that they can and must choose not to continue to exploit nonhuman animals while working to liberate girls and women.

The scales of justice are tilted by money It's rather ironic but far from funny The powerful get cuff links, not handcuffs While prison bars make others' hands rough.

These questions are difficult. The answers are not obvious, and so there should be some pausing, some angst, some honest uncertainty as people struggle to decide the best course of action. But I see none of this in the press releases and reports I read. Instead I see both sides telling us that to be uncertain, to dialogue instead of rail, is to betray the cause.