Activism Quotes
Ramakrishna
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.
4989 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.
2626 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.
1635 Anne Frank
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
4882 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.
4190 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.
3530 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.
2504 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.
2236 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.
4157 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.
3791 Bob Marley
Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.
4460 Ovid
Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.
2469 Mother Teresa
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
2197 Kurt Cobain
The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.
2338 Henry David Thoreau
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
1295 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." -
4901 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.
4694 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.
3525 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.
1631 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.
4435 Shane Claiborne
Most good things have already been said far too many times and just need to be lived.
1421 Abbie Hoffman
There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning!
2141 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.
3705 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.
3507 Auliq Ice
For a man who makes his salvation perfect through suffering, is more of a saint and a loving hero of nature.
3335 Carolyn Baker
Fundamentally, what all forms of positive thinking about collapse come down to is our own fear of death.
3474 Barack Obama
A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.
4358 Jenny Holzer
If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist.
4399 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.
2826 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.
2733 Tariq Ali
It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.
2695 Terry Eagleton
Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
2800 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.
3564 Alec Ross
If Paul Revere had been a modern day citizen, he wouldn't have ridden down Main Street. He would have tweeted.
2230 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.
3516 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.
1466 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!
2195 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.
2983 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.
2717 Rivera Sun
The Earth was singing her revolution. She was calling her brave men and women to her defense.
2147 Rivera Sun
Stop listening to the TV tell you about America the beautiful . . . get up and be America the beautiful.
1300 Dana Kramer-Rolls
War...is ugly and brutalizing, and the nobility is in doing it without becoming ugly and brutalizing.
3720 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.
4063 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.
4828 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.
3937 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.
1690 Anderson Cooper
The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.
1853 John Lennon
If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.
1856 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.
2698 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.
1192 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?
2431 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.
1219 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.
4103 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.
1234 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.
3193 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.
4737 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.
4399 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.
3625 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.
1720 Ronnie Gilbert
Songs are dangerous, songs are subversive and can change your life.
2002 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?
1180 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.
4288 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.
2596 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.
3251