700 Quotes About Activism

How long will you keep fighting the mud? Grow out of it like a lotus.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.

Silence is the language of realization, action is the language of revolution.

Oneness has to be realized, not created. Those who try to create oneness in the world end up creating one more group, one more sect, one more division.

Meditation is a social and political act. Listening and not-doing are actions far more powerful than most of us have yet begun to realize.

You watch cute dog videos today. Tomorrow you discover videos of injured animals. Then you discover videos on animal cruelty. Then you get angry. Then you start seeing cruelty everywhere. News and incidents of cruelty reach you before anyone else. You start going deeper and deeper into an endless spiral.

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.

The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it's a temporary and local place...

What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.