Quotes About Activism

And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.

During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing "activists" and "regular people" became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone.

In short, we have reached what some activists have started calling "Decade Zero" of the climate crisis: we either change now or we lose our chance.29

A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat.

Climate change is indivisible from decolonization.

We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we're really talking about, if we're honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet.

You have been negotiating all my life." So said Canadian college student Anjali Appadurai, as she stared down the assembled government negotiators at the 2011 United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa. She was not exaggerating. The world's governments have been talking about preventing climate change for more than two decades; they began negotiating the year that Anjali, then twenty-one years old, was born.

As Scott Parkin, a climate organizer with the Rainforest Action Network, puts it: "People are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your climate-denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever message about fossil fuels. Now, a new antiestablishment movement has broken with Washington's embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand in front of the bulldozers and coal trucks.

The vast majority of the victims of the Southern Cone's terror apparatus were not members of armed groups but non-violent activists working in factories, farms, shantytowns and universities. They were economists, artists, psychologists and left-wing party loyalists. They were killed not because of their weapons (which most didn't have) but because of their beliefs. In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the War on Terror was a war against all obstacles to the new order

la crise du climat pourrait susciter un sursaut citoyen, une secousse venue de la base, capable de répartir le pouvoir entre les mains du plus grand nombre et d'élargir considérablement le domaine des biens communs, lesquels cesseraient ainsi d'être vendus au plus offrant, morceau par morceau.

Next you will cry about taxation without representation, and throw a basket of tea into the harbor. You are indeed a very Jacobin at heart, and I think I must give up trying to cure you of it; I can but wash my hands and deny responsibility

When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship.

Early on in the pandemic, I asked a renowned medical-freedom activist how he stayed strong in his mission as his name was besmirched and he faced career attacks and social ostracism. He replied with Ephesians 6:12: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

He had no mother but Mother Jones Crying from a jail window of Trinidad: "All I want is room enough to stand And shake my fist at the enemies of the human race.

It's difficult to make the argument that one female fist inserted into one male ass--or, for that matter, dozens or even hundreds of fists inserted into as many asses--can really make a difference for, say, lesbian mothers fighting for custody of their children. -Katherine Raymond

V.L.A.D.: Vampire League Against Discrimination.

The Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery

There's fire in you, Julie. I can see you out there in the street, carrying a banner for all the underprivileged people of the world.

The practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together. Reflective solidarity is crafted by an interaction involving three persons: 'I ask you to stand by me over and against a third.

Going to meetings for Time's Up has been deeply affirming for me.

Whatever labels may be attached to the fifteen charges brought against me, they all arise from my having been a member of the Communist Party and from my activities as a member.

If I never do anything else in this career as a member of Congress, I'm gonna make somebody pay for what they've done to my community and to my people!

I can't speak for the other people whose children have died, but I can speak for my family and the other members of Gold Star Families for Peace. We believe we're honoring our children by working for peace.

We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.