Quotes About Activism

There is no question I consider myself a feminist, but I also think the term 'feminist' has become a topical thing to say without backing it up with any real action.

Who's to say because you're just a basketball player, or you are a basketball player, who's to say you can't chime in on other subjects or other important topics?

The Tories will do everything they can to squash anything threatening to them and I think the involvement of young people in politics is threatening to them and we just don't really care.

I was in Toronto when the big Women's March was going on, and I thought, 'Well, I've never been to a protest, and I can't sit this one out, and they're having a gathering here in Toronto, so I may as well go,' and gosh, I didn't expect 60,000 or 65,000 people to be there - it was huge! It was something that I didn't feel I could sit out at all.

When 1.2 million people come together for Pride in Toronto, that's great, but we now need to start paying it forward and thinking about the rest of the world.

Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of 'experiments' banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility. I have never seen an animal suffer pain.

By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails, and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.

Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.

There are nations, where people live in captivity, fear and silence. I believe, one day from prison camps and torture cells and from exile the leaders of freedom will emerge. The world should stand with those oppressed people until the day of their freedom finally arrives.

We rarely know what motivates somebody in their work, and it's usually a particular moment in their life. For me, that moment is my brother's incarceration and the ways in which this country has decided to neglect, abuse, and sometimes torture people with severe mental illness, especially if they're black.

My feminism does not demand that a woman have an equal opportunity to torture, alongside men. Torture is no less wrong because a woman, not a man, carries it out.

In my view, the most important lesson we can learn from Dr. King is not what he said at the March on Washington but what he said and did after the march. In the years following the march, he did not play politics to see what crumbs a fundamentally corrupt system might toss to the beggars for justice.

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

I'm totally against the death penalty - which, if anyone has a right to support, I do - because I do not see it as a deterrent to crime.

The women's movement in England was totally against Margaret Thatcher.

At the time it seemed like there was a loosening of culture, there was a counterculture, there was a radicalization. I think we totally misread what was really going on in the world, that somehow a small group of people could mobilize a larger group of people.

Not only is fur cruel, it's also totally gross. I mean, who wants to wear the skin of an abused animal? Not me!

Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head.

While most activists could use a good dose of gentleness, I think most believers could use a good dose of holy anger.

When we begin enacting the new world, the nations will follow. Nations will not lead us to peace; it is people who will lead the nation to peace as they begin to humanize the nations.

truth is that much stands in the way of God's will for our world, beasts like what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the giant triplets of evil: racism, militarism, and materialism.

Limiting violence was a good place to start. Abolishing it is a good place to end.

It is here that we see a Jesus who abhors both passivity and violence, who carves out a third way that is neither submission nor assault, neither fight nor flight. It is this third way, Wink writes, that teaches that "evil can be opposed without being mirrored . . . oppressors can be resisted without being emulated . . . enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed."7

This is prophetic work, and Christians are called to be the prophets of a new and better world, not just the chaplains of empire and defenders of the status quo.