Best 372 quotes in «social justice quotes» category

Maggie knew Betsy was a female crusader, but also knew that many times crusaders like her were only interested in their own personal equality.

Many social justice activists--many feminists--continue to work against one form of oppression while feeding the flames of another, without noticing that the blow torch behind the flames must be tuned off before we can have any hope of putting out the resultant fires.

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

My business is anything that comes between men and the Spirit of God.

Negroes were constantly being arrested in the city, for crimes they committed and for crimes they did not, for rudeness or talking back or looking at a white woman, for being in the wrong neighborhood or being suspected of being in the vicinity of the wrong neighborhood. Upon conviction, many of these men were, in the words of one historian, "literally sold to the highest bidders." Convicts were much in demand as workers, and the state, not the convict, got the wage.

No individual or species is privileged in the world of nature: All eat and are eaten; all become sick and die in their turn. Humans are part of an interconnected continuum of life.

No-one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.

On the appointed day -- I think it was the next day, but no matter -- Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful. It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.

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. (Those who have taken up a plantbased diet for any measure of time never want for fabulous foods. From my experience, people who discover the vast array of wonderful plant-based foods that are readily available in most of our communities never look back.) Each of us decides, over the course of our daily lives, whether we will ignore the suffering of nonhuman animals who are caught in laboratories, veal crates, circuses, and slaughterhouses, or choose to invest in compassionate, healthy alternatives . . . . 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.

More than being humans, we need peace and love. More than being strong and capable, we need compassion. More than being clever, we need kindness and gentleness.

More than being human, we need peace and love. More than being strong and capable, we need compassion. More than being clever, we need kindness and gentleness. But where are all these sense of humanity? Where is the love that we have for human life and nature? Where is the peace that we once had? What about our dreams, dream of a better world? Little children are crying, am beginning to feel guilty. Where is that sense of brotherhood? Where is the compassion? What about our faith, have we lost trust in God?

Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis - they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.

Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence?

. . . no human being would wish to trade places with nonhuman animals in factory farms or laboratories. . . . The legal status of women and nonwhite racialized minorities has improved markedly in the past fifty years; matters have grown considerably worse for nonhuman animals.

nonviolence worked not because it melted the heart of the oppressor, but because people seized their social, political, and economic power, and refused to let business-as-usual continue until their demands were met.

On the other hand, activist Christians who talk much about justice promote a notion of justice that envisions a society in which faith in God is rendered quite unnecessary, since everybody already believes in peace and justice even when everybody does not believe in God.

Oppressions are by definition linked--linked by common ideologies, by institutional forces, and by socialization that makes oppressions normative and invisible.

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.

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

Overlooked in this ominous depiction might be our country’s best- kept secret: in dealing with the most challenging issues of every gener- ation, resistance to duplicitous civil authority and its corporate enablers has defined our quintessential American story.

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.

People took ownership of the shalom and wholeness of their community; and, if something was wrong, they worked to right it, even if it wasn’t their fault.

People who are driven by their values will overcome hurdles, difficulties, and obstacles in ways that people driven only by profit will never be able to

Present injustices exist not so much because simple individuals are acting in bad faith or lacking in charity, but because huge, impersonal systems (that seem beyond the control of the individuals acting within them) disprivilege some even as they unduly privilege others.

Racism doesn't have to fit our stereotypes for what it is in order for it to hurt - but it also means that tools for dismantling the system don't have it fit our stereotype either.

Reflective learning provokes critical thinking, enabling us to pose relevant questions, revealing the profound oceans of ignorance that surround even the most learned scholars in our fields of modern knowledge, invoking us to be active participants in the crusade for equality, representation, and social justice.

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

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

Righteous people fulfill God’s commands and work for the wholeness and justice of their community.

school people must not fall into the trap of thinking that early preparation for an unjust world requires early exposure to injustice

Selflessness was a lonely world

Our current contempt for poverty stems from information overload--this is the enabler---our over education as privileged people-- perhaps the real culprit--and our secret assurance that we ourselves owe no one anything beyond the exhausting daily round. We will defend our lack of idealism to anyone and be horrifyingly well received in this age. Indeed, many so called financial "philosophies" are in fact nothing more than elaborate justification for one petty selfishness after the next.

Our entire lives we witness individuals, the ones who break some of the most culturally sensitive moral codes, ruined permanently by the media - i.e. shamed ruthlessly by the masses - i.e. dragged horribly by the village. While this is often intended to serve as a deterrent for the rest of us not to do anything too stupid, many of us choose to do stupid things anyway; and surely it is because the lot of us regard it simply as a challenge to bravery and a temptation to try to rise above or sneak past the law, to outsmart the justice system: I'm afraid the notion 'It'll never happen to me' is one of mankind's greatest hits.

Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered. In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck. Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students. This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not. The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.

People often call fighting discrimination being 'PC' because they don't want their own unearned privileges challenged.

Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names.

Points of views that are expressed on Twitter don’t intend to offend, but rather defend and open the conversation up to everyone so that no one has to pretend.

Prejudice is a plague that can only be eradicated by love.

Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die!

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.

Scholars and enlightened always want to define the differences between communism, socialism, fascism and other economic or political systems. It really doesn't matter to those who are subjected to those societies how someone has articulated their misery.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.