700 Quotes About Activism

The Revolution will be live. And where will you be? In the historic pictures being beamed around the world, or watching at home in your comfortable seat, just as you have watched everything else, including your whole life, passing you by? Change isn’t the responsibility of others. It’s yours.

Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change.

Is not the true respect and worship of God the exercising of our power in such a way that we are also respected?

[W]e are the ones to blame for enabling and even nourishing the toxic workplaces. In continuing to cooperate with a profoundly unhealthy and exploitative employment system, we become at once the dagger and the wound. Wounds never heal so long as they continue to cooperate with daggers. In a sense, the cure is in the disease itself. Our silence is the disease. Our serious commitment for change and for exposing power abuses and bullies is the cure.

To this day, I attempt to walk through walls, real and imagined, external and internal. Sometimes in the midst of stress, insanity, wannabe dictators, wars, cruelty, injustice, greed, quarantines, pandemic viruses, I think back to those days along these roads. In my mind, I have never stopped walking.

A true artist is pleased the most by the sight of his or her work at work.

A furious researcher stumbled out of one of the lab buildings and shouted, 'I'm a scientist working on the AIDS cure. Why are you here? You are making too much noise.' It was a statement that epitomized the vast and growing rift between scientists and patients.

One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an unfree world, and in the course of redefining family, church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. To attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.

While we cannot close our eyes to what is happening around us, it is important for each of us as individuals to refuse to hate another human being and commit to compassion, love, peace and nonviolence in the world. In becoming aware and resistant to evil, we should be wary of becoming part of the evil ourselves.