Activism Quotes - Page 17

• All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.

  Bill McKibben

  Smart, Squares, Uprising

  Source: www.wolverinefarm.org

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• I don't know why there's not more activism today. I do think that your generation is twenty times smarter than our generation ever was, but the problem with being smart like you guys is that it can lead you really easily to being cynical, and cynicism is actually a pacifying attitude.

  Bill Ayers

  Attitude, Smart, Thinking

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  Men, Philanthropy, Ends

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard A. Posner (1997). “The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.”, p.95, University of Chicago Press

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• Art and activism seem to go together naturally, the idea being that if you're an entertainer, you can have a voice, and if you have a voice, you can make a difference. But if I were not an actress, I would still try to extend myself beyond my little micro-universe of my job, family and personal joy.

  Salma Hayek

  Art, Jobs, Ideas

  "Salma on Her Lifesaving Work (and Brand-New Baby)". Interview with Eve Ensler, www.glamour.com. March 2, 2008.

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• The Organization of Afro-American Unity was an organization that was a secular group. It largely consisted of people that we would later call several years later Black Powerites, Black nationalists, progressives coming out of the Black freedom struggle, the northern students' movement, people - students, young people, professionals, workers, who were dedicated to Black activism and militancy, but outside of the context of Islam.

  Manning Marable

  Struggle, Years, Organization

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• I think we have responsibilities to be active in the things we believe in, regardless of what our job is. At least in my lifetime, there has been a tremendous combining of activism and music, that came up in the era of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary.

  Bonnie Raitt

  Jobs, Believe, Responsibility

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• To me, a political song is also a personal song. Most political activism has been driven by empathy for other people and the desire for a world that's less divisive. Even if songs aren't overtly political, they can make a listener more empathetic.

  Conor Oberst

  Song, People, Political

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• Hotels are amazing spaces and platform for activism. If they placed voting booths in hotels and other space of hospitality - a lot more people would vote. Voting poll stations aren't easily accessible. These phone booths should be in more hotels and public spaces. Activism is accessibility. Bravo to the Standard for making it possible.

  Mickalene Thomas

  People, Voting, Vote

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• In terms of activism, the Trump-era transformation of news into entertainment has had a deep effect on the way that collegiate politics are perceived. Campuses are a main flashpoint of the post-2016 culture wars about free speech, racism, and elite privilege. That's undeniable.

  Vanessa Grigoriadis

  War, Racism, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It makes me so angry when people say, "We never hear from people who are happy doing sex work." Well, that's because they're working. The activism privileges people who hated doing sex work, are no longer doing it, and have a job at a social service organization, for example, that trains them on how to speak to the media. We are hearing from those people quite a bit.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Speak, Hated

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Students typically are at a period of their lives when they're more free than at any other time. They're out of parental control. They're not yet burdened by the needs of trying to put food on the table in a pretty repressive environment, often, and they're free to explore, to create, to invent, to act, and to organize. Over and over through the years, student activism has been extremely significant in initiating and galvanizing major changes. I don't see any reason for that to change.

  Noam Chomsky

  Trying, Students, Environment

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• My reporting in Africa wouldn't be political per se, but it's certainly the point of my reporting - and of a lot of other reporters I know: Human suffering is bad, and if reporting stories about it brings it to light and someone does something, that's part of the point of journalism. And it's a thin line between that and activism, and you have to be careful about that.

  Sebastian Junger

  Political, Suffering, Journalism

  "A Few Good Men". Interview With Adam Weinstein, www.motherjones.com. September/October 2010.

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• Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.

  Eric Drooker

  Art, Real, Fall

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When we, hijras, started our activism, we had to tell people, "We exist, we are humans. Please give us nothing but our basic dignity." The biggest misery in the world, I believe, is the feeling of being unloved, and that this community faces a lot. You're not even considered to be human. You're considered transparent. We were ignored until we started organizing, when HIV first became a factor. Even in the HIV world, people could not believe that hijras have sex. And then also we were put in the category of men having sex with men, the gay community.

  Laxmi Narayan Tripathi

  Believe, Gay, Men

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I want to make activism a bigger part of my life, while hopefully maintaining the opportunity to help out causes that I really care about. And being an actor allows me to do that. Shooting a Cisco commercial allows me to do that. I mean, doing all these things allows me to talk about these issues. But don't think there aren't those moments where I'm like, "What am I doing? I have to quit my job and chain myself to a tree." Believe me, I have those moments.

  Ellen Page

  Believe, Mean, Thinking

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• The fact is that there's hundreds of thousands of incredibly motivated, active political partisans working on the blogs. These people generate buzz, it generates local activism. These aren't the kind of people that pay attention a little to politics, turn it off and then do something else. They live and breathe politics. And anybody that wants to build a movement or a successful campaign needs people like the people who read blogs.

  Markos Moulitsas

  Successful, People, Political

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• Right now, American government has stepped back from offering any kinds of protection for human rights and public health. And the fossil fuel industry thinks that they have just absolute free rein to go for it. The one thing in the way is public opposition. It's civil society. It's activism.

  Annie Leonard

  Thinking, Human Rights, Kind

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Activism, to me, I don't know if it really works. It may work for somebody else, but it does not work for me.

  Tommy Chong

  Doe, May, Working It

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• It's not like activist work is a nice add-on to what's really important, the spiritual work. The two are inseparable and it goes both ways. Many people are hardcore activists for decades, and they encounter burnout, futility, or a feeling of imbalance. Sometimes they need to go so far as to drop their activism and go on a spiritual journey. They're realizing that all the stuff they're trying to change in the world isn't just out there in the world. It's in them, too. And as long as they're blind to what's in them, they're going to continually re-create it in all that they do.

  Charles Eisenstein

  Spiritual, Nice, Journey

  Source: www.mindfulnessbell.org

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• The struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions all has a single, very simple solution... Here it is: Put a price on carbon.

  Al Gore

  Country, Struggle, Cutting

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• One should be cautious about "general conceptions." I think a strong case can be made that activism today is as high as ever, perhaps more so, and is also taking new and significant forms. There has never been anything like the international solidarity movements that began to take shape in the 1980s, right in the mainstream, or the global justice movements that have become a very powerful force in later years. It's true that the society is highly atomized, which does induce a sense of hopelessness often - quite mistakenly I think.

  Noam Chomsky

  Strong, Powerful, Thinking

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• The Tea Party is simply a loose description of local activism driven by Americans who want smaller government and more self-reliance. That sounds like what the Founding Fathers had in mind, does it not?

  Bill O'Reilly

  Father, Party, Government

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• I think more and more foundations are putting resources into food activism. But I think that given the state of the economy, foundations won't be giving as much in general. For me it's about working with these existing institutions in communities that people already go to, that people trust, that they know, and determining how best they can play a role in the creation of local food systems and address the ills that are right around them in the community.

  Bryant Terry

  Thinking, People, Giving

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• Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self.

  Tom Robbins

  Self, Seductive, Political

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• In your dreams you can see yourself as a prophet saving the world.

  Frank Zappa

  Dream, Peace, Special

  Song: Son Of Orange County

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