Quotes Tagged "activism"

Most good things have already been said far too many times and just need to be lived.

There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning!

You do it for yourself. You don’t expect to change the world. You don’t even expect to influence your family or your friends. You do it because you can’t not do it and be who you are. Or who you’re meant to be.

Home is where you feel safe, a place with people you can count on and where you can be yourself

When we are able to listen to someone else's story with an open heart and hear their experience, which may look different than ours, we begin to close the gap between them and us.

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

One of the most useful skills advocates can develop is a sincere satisfaction in changing their mind, putting the goal of effectiveness before the goal of having been correct.

An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment.

Those who seek greater justice in our world need to work toward a deeper understanding of oppressions. Activists need to develop the kind of understanding that will lead to a lifestyle—a way of being—that works against all oppressions. . . . This requires us to be open to change as a response to what other social justice activists say—especially those advocating against parallel interlocking oppressions. We cannot end just one form of oppression, so we need to be on board with other activists. If we are not, we doom social justice activists to perpetually pulling up the innumerable shoots that spring from the very deep roots of oppression. Furthermore, inability to see one’s own privilege and ignorance of the struggles that others face (in a homophobic, racist, ageist, ableist, sexist society) are major impediments to social justice activism. Those who are privileged must get out of the way so that others can take the lead, bringing new social justice concerns and methods to the activist’s table.

Whoever educates the children controls the future. If we want a democratic future, we must plant the seeds in our little dandelions nationwide and ensure that our education is governed of, by, and for the people.

Museum education has the power and the responsibility to do the challenging inner work of tackling tough topics and turning them into teachable moments.

Paternalism is the method of government activism most amenable to an impoverished public sector.

My pro-choice activism keeps me busy.

My activism and sexual revolution in New York was a factor.

Somebody referred to what I do as subliminal activism, which I like.