Top 100 Quotes About Activism
#2. Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
Alice Walker
#3. Technology works best when it facilitates human hope, activism, engagement & intervention.
Mal Fletcher
#4. My attention since 'Clueless' has been on family, relationships, activism, the planet, and my career.
Alicia Silverstone
#5. Usually the way I think someone is radicalized is through a personal experience. The thing about environmental activism is that we are all having a personal experience with our environment, whether we open our eyes or not.
Peter Sarsgaard
#6. Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
Rebecca Solnit
#7. Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.
Angela Davis
#8. If you join the rat race - you're in the race of rats.
Bertolt Brecht
#9. My activism and sexual revolution in New York was a factor.
Sally Kirkland
#10. For me, policy is best when connected to the roots, and roots are best when connected to policy. So I encourage you all to stay connected ... and walk with real people while doing the activism. Lord knows we need folks who are engaged.
Simone Campbell
#12. Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.
Mahatma Gandhi
#13. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
Elie Wiesel
#14. An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#15. The longer you wait for the future, the shorter it will be.
Loesje
#16. Our Parliamentary system has simply failed to meet the challenge of judicial activism.
Stockwell Day
#17. For me, writing, drawing, and political activism are three separate pursuits; each has its own intensity. I happen to be especially attuned to and engaged with the society in which I live. Both my writing and my drawing are invariably mixed up with politics, whether I want them to be or not.
Gunter Grass
#18. Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself.
Criss Jami
#19. being critical is more than just doing critique, as social change that leads to equity also requires informing policy and practice through advocacy and activism
Jill Blackmore
#20. You didn't choose God. He chose you. When you stop feeling hurt by everyone and plotting your comeback, he has some very important things he wants you to accomplish with your life.
Shannon L. Alder
#21. There's a big difference between charity and between activism and philanthropy. They're very different things and I think, you know, everybody should find a passion or a cause that they can really get behind, but it has to be organic.
Eva Longoria
#22. Could it be that following our initiatory path and connecting with higher source wisdom might actually be one of our species' best defense systems?
Jonathan Talat Phillips
#23. The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and
Rebecca Solnit
#25. As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.
Edwin Meese
#26. Trans activism in the US has most frequently been grassroots, centered on poverty and criminalization, and often oppositional to the exclusionary "mainstreaming" threads in gay and lesbian politics and feminist politics.
Dean Spade
#28. We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#29. If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.
Joseph Sobran
#30. For a man who makes his salvation perfect through suffering, is more of a saint and a loving hero of nature.
Auliq Ice
#31. What lies between where you are and where you want to be sometimes requires traveling through the Twilight Zone.
Shannon L. Alder
#33. In a world where very few people care if you live or die, there is a light that shines in the distance. It has a name that they call hope and it carries with it people that never stop caring. They learned long ago that extending mercy was not a choice, but a place where God lives.
Shannon L. Alder
#34. To reform the world - means to reform upbringing...
Janusz Korczak
#35. Strength of character comes from being hit by stray verbal stones, while protecting discarded ciphers in the snow.
Shannon L. Alder
#36. I really admired Cesar Chavez and Gandhi, but my form of activism would have to be the written word, not the empty stomach. My parents had brought my family t the United States because of the fear of empty stomachs.
Josefina Lopez
#37. Use the KEY to change: Knowledge Empowers You!
Andrew Kreig
#38. My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me.
Bayard Rustin
#39. An Act of Dissent is simply a way of saying, 'No, I do not accept this and, as my silence may be construed as acquiescence, I would like to make a small gesture to indicate that you can all go fuck yourselves.
Mark Thomas
#40. I was surprised to find myself in tears. Because these women had trusted me to help as a writer, I began to see a way of bringing together two things - writing and activism - that until then had torn me apart in everyday life.
Gloria Steinem
#41. If the apostles reminded even Paul himself to remember the poor (Galatians 2:10), then surely the rest of us need such a reminder.
Russell D. Moore
#43. If collapse is anything, it is a planetary immersion in the maelstrom of
paradox. Unless we understand and honor paradox, we will end up, like all of
the mainstream media on earth, asking all of the wrong questions.
Carolyn Baker
#44. As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination.
Pankaj Mishra
#45. 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
#46. Stop listening to the TV tell you about America the beautiful ... get up and be America the beautiful.
Rivera Sun
#48. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E.B. White
#49. You need the activism. You need people who are organized and willing to bring light to injustices in society.
Maya Harris
#50. I guess it's the curse of our generation, having to put aside our lives to do the right thing.
Allan Dare Pearce
#51. It is incumbent upon us to do what we can, even if we cannot do much.
David Smail
#52. The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection...
Rebecca Solnit
#53. My activism has to do with my conscience; I cannot let certain things slide without doing something. My public speaking is part of an art form that is cultural.
Lee Maracle
#54. Channel your outrage ... Do that which you are able to do.
Kathy Reichs
#55. Whenever anybody gets involved in politics, its always exciting for me because we take for granted our freedoms and our abilities to effect change through political activism.
Emily Saliers
#56. I think, for one, the LGBTQ community is just a paragon of leadership, of standing up and saying "these are our rights, and we deserve them." As a model of activism, it's so wonderful what the community has been able to achieve towards goals like marriage equality.
Jill Stein
#57. Never explain, never retract, never apologize. Just get the thing done and let them howl.
Nellie L. McClung
#58. There are so many battles worth fighting for. The ones not worth fighting are the insecure battles that rage in another person's mind.
Shannon L. Alder
#59. I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.
Dorothy Allison
#60. Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.
Ilana Mercer
#61. I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.
Malcolm X
#62. I have a pretty positive view of environmental activism, but I didn't know much about the ELF. A lot of people make documentaries because they have something they want to say, but I make them because there's something I want to explore.
Marshall Curry
#63. A single whisper can be quite a disturbance when the rest of the audience is silent.
Anthony Marra
#64. My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.
Camille Paglia
#65. Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible
it's to dismantle those systems.
Lierre Keith
#66. It takes a female to have a baby,
It takes a woman to raise a child,
It takes a mother to raise them correctly,
It takes a warrior to show them how to change the world.
Shannon L. Alder
#67. It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.
Wynton Marsalis
#68. I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.
John Steinbeck
#69. We've got to make change our national pastime and hold protests more regularly than weekend parties.
Rivera Sun
#70. Lincoln on Grant: He makes things get. Wherever he is, he makes things move.
Abraham Lincoln
#71. The world is on fire! Why am I sitting in front of my computer? It is because I don't have a fire extinguisher for the world, and there isn't a global 911 to call.
Charles Eisenstein
#72. 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
#73. The enemy is not individuals, churches, 'ex-gay' organisations or political parties; the enemy is ignorance. Change is created by focusing our energies on overcoming the latter instead of attacking the former.
Anthony Venn-Brown
#74. When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.
Camille Paglia
#75. If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist.
Jenny Holzer
#76. I intend to go right on appointing highly qualified individuals of the highest personal integrity to the bench, individuals who understand the danger of short-circuiting the electoral process and disenfranchising the people through judicial activism.
Ronald Reagan
#77. The church wanted us to give out food to malnourished children, but they didn't want us to question why they were malnourished to begin with.
Elvia Alvarado
#78. Say what you want but you NEVER say it with violence!
Gerard Way
#79. 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
#80. The time for blithely asserting that sleeping with whomever you want however you want is going to jam its machinery is long past.
Maggie Nelson
#81. If we can practice opening to the crises in our personal lives as teaching moments, as evolutionary stepping stones, we will be far better prepared emotionally and spiritually for the trauma that collapse will foist on us and everyone around us.
Carolyn Baker
#82. Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
#83. 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
#85. I don't think that God says, "Go to church and pray all day and everything will be fine." No. For me God says, "Go out and make the changes that need to be made, and I'll be there to help you.
Elvia Alvarado
#86. Films can't change the society; they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#87. My policing was nothing but activism - it had to be.
Kiran Bedi
#88. Sacred Activism is the fusion of the mystic's passion for God with the activist's passion for justice, creating a third fire, which is the burning sacred heart that longs to help, preserve, and nurture every living thing.
Andrew Harvey
#89. While acting is what I do for a living, activism is what I do to stay alive.
Martin Sheen
#90. It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.
Aristotle.
#91. Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied - they don't after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else.
Morrissey
#92. I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.
Susan Sarandon
#93. The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe!
G.K. Chesterton
#94. 16 days of activism? I don't know about you folks, but I'm an activist every single day.
Christina Engela
#95. We urgently need to do - and I mean actually do - something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don't think we will.
I think we're fucked.
Stephen Emmott
#96. The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.
Kurt Cobain
#97. Words are fossilized butterfly wings,
pretty to look at sometimes,
but only good for Museums.
I want to miserably burn down the Museums.
Jeremiah Walton
#98. Dignity is never silent. It has a voice, heart and soul. Truth and courage is its foundation. It will stand against the masses and speak the truth. Because every great person has always done what others found fear in doing.
Shannon L. Alder
#100. So the danger of conservative judicial activism has been averted for another year. Stay tuned.
Michael Kinsley
