Quotes About Activism

Since the age of four, I've been exploring what I can do with the written word: everything from championing literacy and youth voice to raising awareness about world hunger.

All through the ages the African people have made efforts to deliver themselves from oppressive forces.

He (Dave Brower) is an emotionalist in an age of dangerous reason.

I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

The supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.

The act of civil disobedience is the act of taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistance.

People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.

we had better bear in mind also something that I am not the first or the smartest writer to notice: that for the making and sustenance of movements hatred is more effective than love.

I hope I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly.

In fact, the flashy, antiauthoritarian vaulters were suspiciously regarded, often with reason, by the coaches and their more loyal athletes as Thoreau-reading, dope-smoking, John Carlos–loving hippies.

My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian. M.K. Gandhi, Defence in a trial for sedition, 1922

Maria Spiridonova

In 1964 a coalition of activists, technologists, and academics delivered "The Triple Revolution", an open memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The signatories pointed out that "wealth produced by machines… is still wealth", and used this to argue for more a equitable distribution of global profits.

I think people should be angry at things that are worthy of anger. Injustice is outrageous and deserves outrage.

Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.

I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

if we don't rebel, if we're not physically in an active rebellion, then it's spiritual death.

Audubon and NWF CEOs would send out during the week fundraising letters protesting the killing of a particular species of animal and then spend the weekend killing ducks or other animals for fun and recreation. For example, former NWF

If people are engaged, eventually the political system responds, despite the money, despite the lobbyists, it still responds. ~ President Obama

Way beyond the calls for equal pay, self-sovereignty, choice, politi­cal, legal and educational equality, as woman we each need to search our souls, grieve the enormity of what has befallen us, then find new ways to step outside the shame, to channel the outrage into outlets for progress. We need to cease identification with our oppressors so that we may lift up other women and learn the powerful word that means "no.

Le grand danger qui guette la lutte des femmes aujourd'hui est celui-ci : que l'en deça de la question féministe soit présenté et vécu, comme son au-delà, permettant ou visant à permettre, l'économie...de la lutte tout simplement.

The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.

Change is not, then, a matter of "magical" thinking or waving a "wand"—it is about pushing ideas, building movements, and challenging the status quo.

The only sure way to alter today's patently unequal democracy is for average Americans to mobilize politically—to break out of their political inertia and to move forcefully back into the political arena.