Activism Quotes

Ramakrishna

You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And
You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not.

Elie Wiesel

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

E.B. White

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

Anne Frank

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

Margaret Mead

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Malcolm X

I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Bill Gates

Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Martin Luther King Jr.

As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation - either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.

Bob Marley

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up
Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.

Ovid

Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.

Mother Teresa

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.

Kurt Cobain

The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.

Edward O. Wilson

People would rather believe than know.

Henry David Thoreau

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Swami Vivekananda

arise,awake,stop not until your goal is achieved.

Clare Boothe Luce

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes." ~ ' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes." -

Mother Teresa

If I look at the mass I will never act.

Malcolm X

The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.

Elie Wiesel

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

Elsa Tamez

‎God remains silent so that men and women may speak, protest, and struggle. God remains silent so that people may really become people. When God is silent and men and women cry, God cries in solidarity with them but doesn't intervene. God waits for the shouts of protest.

Anthony Standen

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.

Shane Claiborne

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

Abbie Hoffman

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

Martin Sheen

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.

Leonardo Da Vinci

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.

Auliq Ice

For a man who makes his salvation perfect through suffering, is more of a saint and a loving hero of nature.

Carolyn Baker

Fundamentally, what all forms of positive thinking about collapse come down to is our own fear of death.

Barack Obama

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

Jenny Holzer

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

Joseph Sobran

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.

Christopher Hitchens

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.

Tariq Ali

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

Terry Eagleton

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

Seyla Benhabib

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.

Alec Ross

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

John Thackway

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.

Rod Serling

The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in, becoming narcissistic.

Hunter S. Thompson

To crank up a noisy bad stance out in a place like San Francisco and start yelling about “getting things done in Washington” is like sitting far back in the end zone seats at the Super Bowl and screaming at the Miami linebackers “Stop Duane Thomas!

Theodore Kaczynski

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.

Junius Williams

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.

Rivera Sun

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

Rivera Sun

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

Dana Kramer-Rolls

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

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.

Elvia Alvarado

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.

Jonathan Talat Phillips

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.

Jonathan Talat Phillips

We need to stop fighting the old systems and start creating new containers for people who are going through these spiritual openings,’ Tavis reflected. ‘Together, we need to build something that’s never existed before - a global network of light.

E.A. Bucchianeri

I'm all for fighting tyranny and oppression.

Anderson Cooper

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

John Lennon

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

Ilyas Kassam

The path towards peace is not for the righteous, the ethical, the active and the compassionate to shit on the malicious, the complacent, the violent and the ignorant. The path towards peace is to be peaceful.

Joss Whedon

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.

Charles Eisenstein

Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?

Charles Eisenstein

The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.

Charles Eisenstein

When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.

Charles Eisenstein

The world is on fire! Why am I sitting in front of my computer? It is because I don’t have a fire extinguisher for the world, and there isn’t a global 911 to call.

Charles Eisenstein

The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.

Charles Eisenstein

It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar.

Fear it or not, it is happening already.

Charles Eisenstein

I am saying that there is a time to do, and a time not to do, and that when we are slave to the habit of doing we are unable to distinguish between them.

Charles Eisenstein

Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.

Charles Eisenstein

It is the cry of the separate self, ‘What about me?’ As long as we keep acting from that place, it doesn’t matter who wins the war against (what they see as) evil. The world will not deviate from its death-spiral.

Ronnie Gilbert

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

H.G. Wells

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?

David H. Hackworth

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.

Daniel Younger

A little difference is still different.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Until you find a cause you can die for, you are not worthy to live.

Robert Graves

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.

Michel Foucault

Where there is power, there is resistance.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

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