Quotes About Resistance

There does not seem to be anything within the principles of Islam by which to resist the slide into sharia (Islamic law), while there is everything to encourage it. This is a terrible truth that we have to face:

when I chaired meetings in 2009 to consider whether our administration should take a fresh position on something, I often heard one of two entrenched views: We never do that, or We always do that. The past was prologue: those who had conceived of policies in a certain way were ill disposed to try something new.

Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat.

Bleed, bleed, poor country!Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure;For goodness dares not check thee!His title is affear'd.Shakesp.Macbeth.

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.

The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me… When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking...

Strangely, though, in the midst of occupation and the utter failure of the Arab regimes, a sense of freedom was emerging: a notion that the Palestinians were suddenly free to think and act for themselves. In the weeks after the occupation, Bashir began to believe that his people would go back to their homeland only through the sweat and blood of Palestinian armed struggle. He was far from alone in this assessment.

to never again be led like sheep to the slaughter.

The text is your greatest enemy.

The devil frequently fills our thoughts with great schemes, so that instead of putting our hands to what work we can do to serve our Lord, we may rest satisfied with wishing to perform impossibilities.

A complaint can be how you live with yourself because a complaint is an attempt to address what is wrong, not to cope with something, not to let it happen, not to let it keep happening. You refuse to adjust to what is unjust. A complaint can be a way of not doing nothing. I think the double negative is often the terrain of complaint

A complaint can come out of a sense that unless you complain, the same thing will keep happening. In other words, a complaint can be what you have to make to stop the same thing from happening.

A complaint becomes a recording device; you have to record what you do not want to reproduce. This is what I mean by complaint as nonreproductive labor: all the work you have to do in order not to reproduce an inheritance.

A structure can enable promotion. And if you challenge those structures, you are the one who becomes self-promotional.

If a world can be what we learn not to notice, noticing becomes a form of political labor.

Complaints about hostile environments might be necessary in order not to reproduce hostile environments. But complaints about hostile environments are often made in hostile environments.

A complaint can be a point you reach when you can't take it, when you are "just done with this," the violence

When violence gets in, a complaint comes out.

Whiteness can be reproduced in the spaces where it is supposedly being questioned. You even have to do the work of questioning the terms of their terms ("if you want to decolonize, we'll do it on our terms"). If you don't use their terms, or if you question their terms, what happens then? You might be dropped; you might be stopped. But the questions you raise are turned into questions about you.

So much of the inventiveness of student activism comes from an intimate knowledge of how institutions work to protect themselves, comes out of an experience of being obstructed, whether by procedures or by people.

If two or three of the most important people in your life are telling you something and you are resisting it with everything you have, there is a distinct possibly [sic] that what they are saying is true.

I just don't know, I said, my voice sounding bumby, not like mine, how do you help someone who doesn't want your help. What do you do when you can't do anything?

Whenever you made a choice, especially one you'd been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.

I wondered again why the right thing always seemed to be met with so much resistance, when you'd think it would be the easier path. You had to fight to be virtuous...