Quotes About Resistance

It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.

I wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine. It was Father's voice. It was Thomas'. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.

You do your rebellions any way you can.

You think there's no detriment in a slave learning to read? There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat.

She couldn't get free and she couldn't pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.

I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing.

Martha Whites were a form of punishment only T. Ray could have dreamed up. I shut my mouth instantly.

A Divine Feminine symbol acts to deconstruct patriarchy, which is one of the reasons there's so much resistance, even hysteria, surrounding the idea of Goddess. The idea of Goddess is so powerfully "other," so vividly female, it comes like a crowbar shattering the lock patriarchy holds on divine imagery.

We had a signal. When I turned the pail upside down by the kitchen house, that meant everything was clear. Mauma would open the window and throw down a taffy she stole from missus' room. Sometimes here came a bundle of cloth scraps—real nice calicos, gingham, muslin, some import linen. One time, that true brass thimble. Her favorite thing to take was scarlet-red thread. She would wind it up in her pocket and walk right out the house with it.

Men's resistance often grows out of their fear--fear that everything is going to change, that women's gain is their loss, that women will 'turn the tables on them.' Men need to become aware, but blaming them doesn't help. It only polarizes. Eventually I came to see that what's need is to invite them into our struggle, to make them part of our quest.

I ain't sorry for stealing it, just for getting caught." "How come you took it?" "Cause," she said. "Cause I could." Those words stuck with me. Mauma didn't want that cloth, she just wanted to make some trouble. She couldn't get free and she couldn't pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.

There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control. Yes, it's unfair to deprive them, but there's a greater good here that must be protected.

I began to glimpse the chasm that lay between the inclinations of my soul and my ability to carry them out. I had had a clear, pure moment of knowing that compelled me to risk my religion and move beyond patriarchy at church and within my spiritual life, but actually doing it? Now that was something else altogether...Yes, I was withering within these things. Internally I felt trapped.

The truth," she said, "is that every girl must have ambition knocked out of her for her own good. You are unusual only in your determination to fight what is inevitable. You resisted and so it came to this, to being broken like a horse.

Maybe one reason I had avoided my anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible. We can allow anger's enormous energy to lead us to acts of resistance against patriarchy.

these good men who wished to quash us, gently, of course, benignly, for the good of abolition, for our own good, for their good, for the greater good. It was all so familiar. Theirs was only a different kind of muzzle.

Life had taken a mallet to me.

Countries like Canada realize this, and have seen the burgeoning American resistance to immigration as something to be exploited. "If you guys cannot figure out your immigration system, we're going to invite the best and brightest to come north of the border," said Jason Kenney, Canada's immigration minister for Stephen Harper's Conservative government, before a 2013 trip to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ground on which we can only be saved from destruction by fighting without delay, is desperate ground.

Do not press a desperate enemy.

Every animal with blood in its veins and horns on its head will fight when it is attacked.

Don't be surprised if your mind plays tug-of-war between wanting to do something new and wanting to go back to the familiar. It is a natural human reaction to resist change. At first, remind yourself to keep an open mind, even if you don't like the new activity. Tell yourself, "Give it a try" and "Stick with it.

Resistance to tyranny ius obedience to God

South Carolina senator James Chestnut facetiously promised to drink all the blood that was shed, since he thought the war woudn't amount to anything serious. "Southern secessionists believed northerners would never mobilize to halt national division or that they would mount nothing more than brief and ineffective resistance," writes Drew Gilpin Faust in her book on the Civil War, This Republic of Suffering.