Famous Activist Quotes

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

It’s time that women participate in the management of this pathetic world on terms equal to men. Often women in power behave like hard men because it’s been the only way they could compete and command, but when we reach a critical number of women in positions of power and leadership we will tip the balance toward a more just and egalitarian civilization. More than forty years ago Bella Abzug, the famous activist and congresswoman from New York, summarized the above in one sentence: “In the twenty-first century women will change the nature of power instead of power changing the nature of women.

More than forty years ago Bella Abzug, the famous activist and congresswoman from New York, summarized the above in one sentence: “In the twenty-first century women will change the nature of power instead of power changing the nature of women.

More than forty years ago Bella Abzug, the famous activist and congresswoman from New York, summarized the above in one sentence: “In the twenty-first century women will change the nature of power instead of power changing the nature of women.” My

I thought about the famous line from indigenous Australian writer and activist Lilla Watson, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

A famous expression goes, “The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.” Our human rights campaign made strange bedfellows with Montana beef farmers, Russian human rights activists, and Boeing airplane salesmen, but by working together it appeared as if we had the strength to overpower any remaining resistance to getting the law passed.

The godfather’s name is Saul Alinsky. His most famous students are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hardly anyone recognizes this, but Alinsky and the Alinsky method is the hidden force behind the 2008 economic meltdown. The meltdown was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; it was the main cause of median wealth in the United States in the subsequent three years declining nearly 40 percent. While the meltdown is routinely attributed to Wall Street “greed,” its real cause was government and activist pressure on banks and banking agencies—like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—to change their lending and loan guarantee practices. Yes, the 2008 crash was actually the result of an Alinskyite scam—actually a series of Alinskyite scams, carried out over many years. Basically the Alinskyites were trying to steal money from the banks and, in the process, force the banks to make loans to people that they had no intention of making loans to. The banks acquiesced, and eventually the whole scheme came crashing down. It was toppled not by greed but by the sober reality that when you loan money to millions of people who cannot afford to pay, those people are very likely to default on those loans. That’s how Alinskyites almost destroyed the U.S. economy a few years ago. If Alinsky had never lived, none of this would have happened.

In 1978, an activist named Judi Chamberlin published one of the movement's most revered manifestos called 'On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System.' Chamberlin had been diagnosed with a mental illness and found traditional psychiatric intervention unhelpful and even traumatic. She did recover, however, and she credited that recovery to an alternative mental health care facility she stayed at in Canada. Chamberlin and many other madness pride activists believe that people with 'lived experience' should not only have a proverbial seat at the table when it comes to the creation of mental health care systems, but that such people are uniquely equipped to understand what constitutes the best treatment. A slogan Chamberlin sought to make famous was 'Nothing about us without us.

When I was a kid, my mother thought spinach was the healthiest food in the world because it contained so much iron. Getting enough iron was a big deal then because we didn't have 'iron-fortified' bread. Turns out that spinach is an okay source of iron, but no better than pizza, pistachio nuts, cooked lentils, or dried peaches. The spinach-iron myth grew out of a simple mathematical miscalculation: A researcher accidentally moved a decimal point one space, so he thought spinach had 10 times more iron than it did. The press reported it, and I had to eat spinach. Moving the decimal point was an honest mistake--but it's seldom that simple. If it happened today I'd suspect a spinach lobby was behind it. Businesses often twist science to make money. Lawyers do it to win cases. Political activists distort science to fit their agenda, bureaucrats to protect their turf. Reporters keep falling for it. Scientists sometimes go along with it because they like being famous.

Look at the telephone; it would remind you of a unique scientist, Alexander Graham Bell. He, besides being a great inventor, was also a man of great compassion and service. In fact, much of the research which led to the development of the telephone was directed at finding solutions to the challenges of hearing impaired people and helping them to be able to listen and communicate. Bell’s mother and wife were both hearing impaired and it profoundly changed Bell’s outlook to science. He aimed to make devices which would help the hearing impaired. He started a special school in Boston to teach hearing impaired people in novel ways. It was these lessons which inspired him to work with sound and led to the invention of the telephone. Can you guess the name of the most famous student of Alexander Graham Bell? It was Helen Keller, the great author, activist and poet who was hearing and visually impaired. About her teacher, she once said that Bell dedicated his life to the penetration of that ‘inhuman silence which separates and estranges’.

To our amazement Jimmy received a letter, dated August 20, 1963, from Bertrand Russell, the world-famous philosopher and peace activist, saying “I have recently finished your remarkable book The American Resolution” and “have been greatly impressed with its power and insight.” The letter goes on to ask for Jimmy’s views on whether American whites “will understand the negro [sic] revolt because “the survival of mankind may well follow or fail to follow from political and social behavior of Americans in the next decades.” On September 5 Jimmy wrote back a lengthy reply saying among other things that “so far, with the exception of the students, there has been no social force in the white population which the Negroes can respect and a handful of liberals joining in a demonstration doesn’t change this one bit.” Russell replied on September 18 with more questions that Jimmy answered in an even longer letter dated December 22. Meanwhile, Russell had sent a telegram to the November 21 Town Hall meeting in New York City at which Jimmy was scheduled to speak, warning Negroes not to resort to violence. In response Jimmy said at the meeting that “I too would like to hope that the issues of our revolt might be resolved by peaceful means,” but “the issues and grievances were too deeply imbedded in the American system and the American peoples so that the very things Russell warned against might just have to take place if the Negroes in the U.S.A. are ever to walk the streets as free men.” In his December 22 letter Jimmy repeats what he said at the meeting and then patiently explains to Russell that what has historically been considered democracy in the United States has actually been fascism for millions of Negroes. The letter concludes: I believe that it is your responsibility as I believe that it is my responsibility to recognize and record this, so that in the future words do not confuse the struggle but help to clarify it. This is what I think philosophers should make clear. Because even though Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy, in fact democracy is what they are struggling against. This exchange between Jimmy and Russell has to be seen to be believed. In a way it epitomizes the 1960s—Jimmy Boggs, the Alabama-born autoworker, explaining the responsibility of philosophers to The Earl Russell, O.M., F.R.S., in his time probably the West’s best-known philosopher. Within the next few years The American Revolution was translated and published in French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. To this day it remains a page-turner for grassroots activists because it is so personal and yet political, so down to earth and yet visionary.

The father of communism, Karl Marx, famously predicted the “withering away of the state” once the proletarian revolution had achieved power and abolished private property. Left-wing revolutionaries from the nineteeth-century anarchists on thought it sufficient to destroy old power structures without giving serious thought to what would take their place. This tradition continues up through the present, with the suggestion by antiglobalization authors like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that economic injustice could be abolished by undermining the sovereignty of states and replacing it with a networked “multitude.”17 Real-world Communist regimes of course did exactly the opposite of what Marx predicted, building large and tyrannical state structures to force people to act collectively when they failed to do so spontaneously. This in turn led a generation of democracy activists in Eastern Europe to envision their own form of statelessness, where a mobilized civil society would take the place of traditional political parties and centralized governments. 18 These activists were subsequently disillusioned by the realization that their societies could not be governed without institutions, and when they encountered the messy compromises required to build them. In the decades since the fall of communism, Eastern Europe is democratic, but it is not thereby necessarily happy with its politics or politicians.19 The fantasy of statelessness

While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.

There are two famous quips of Stalin which are both grounded in this logic. When Stalin answered the question "Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?" by "They are both worse!", the underlying premise is that the Leftist deviation is REALLY ("objectively," as Stalinists liked to put it) not leftist at all, but a concealed Rightist one! When Stalin wrote, in a report on a party congress, that the delegates, with the majority of votes, unanimously approved the CC resolution, the underlying premise is, again, that there was really no minority within the party: those who voted against thereby excluded themselves from the party... In all these cases, the genus repeatedly overlaps (fully coincides) with one of its species. This is also what allows Stalin to read history retroactively, so that things "become clear" retroactively: it was not that Trotsky was first fighting for the revolution with Lenin and Stalin and then, at a certain stage, opted for a different strategy than the one advocated by Stalin; this last opposition (Trotsky/Stalin) "makes it clear" how, "objectively," Trotsky was against revolution all the time back. We find the same procedure in the classificatory impasse the Stalinist ideologists and political activists faced in their struggle for collectivization in the years 1928-1933. In their attempt to account for their effort to crush the peasants' resistance in "scientific" Marxist terms, they divided peasants into three categories (classes): the poor peasants (no land or minimal land, working for others), natural allies of the workers; the autonomous middle peasants, oscillating between the exploited and exploiters; the rich peasants, "kulaks" (employing other workers, lending them money or seeds, etc.), the exploiting "class enemy" which, as such, has to be "liquidated." However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a subkulak, a peasant who, although, with regard to his economic situation, was to poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak "counter-revolutionary" attitude.

This wider history notwithstanding, I believe India still constitutes a special case. Its distinctiveness is threefold. First, the tradition of the thinker-activist persisted far longer in India than elsewhere. While the men who founded the United States in the late eighteenth century had fascinating ideas about democracy and nationhood, thereafter American politicians have merely governed and ruled, or sometimes misgoverned and misruled.1 Their ideas, such as these are, have come from professional ideologues or intellectuals. On the other hand, from the first decades of the nineteenth century until the last decades of the twentieth century, the most influential political thinkers in India were, as often as not, its most influential political actors. Long before India was conceived of as a nation, in the extended run-up to Indian independence, and in the first few decades of freedom, the most interesting reflections on society and politics were offered by men (and women) who were in the thick of political action. Second, the relevance of individual thinkers too has lasted longer in India. For instance, Lenin’s ideas were influential for about seventy years, that is to say, from the time the Soviet state was founded to the time it disappeared. Mao’s heyday was even shorter—roughly three decades, from the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 to the repudiation by Deng Xiaoping of his mentor’s ideas in the late 1970s. Turning to politicians in Western Europe, Churchill’s impassioned defence of the British Empire would find no takers after the 1950s. De Gaulle was famous for his invocation of the ‘grandeur de la France’, but those sentiments have now been (fortunately?) diluted and domesticated by the consolidation of the European Union. On the other hand, as this book will demonstrate, Indian thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still speak in many ways to the concerns of the present. A third difference has to do with the greater diversity of thinkers within the Indian political tradition. Even Gandhi and Nehru never held the kind of canonical status within their country as Mao or Lenin did in theirs. At any given moment, there were as many Indians who were opposed to their ideas as were guided by them. Moreover, the range of issues debated and acted upon by politicians and social reformers appears to have been far greater in India than in other countries. This depth and diversity of thought was, as I argue below, in good part a product of the depth and diversity of the society itself.

flight of conservative students from the Ivy League and fancy northeastern liberal arts colleges is not entirely new. The right has persistently leveled charges of elitism against the left for decades. Highly educated cosmopolitans seem to more tradition-minded conservatives to be America’s biggest critics—and least trustworthy leaders. In 1963 conservative activist William F. Buckley famously said, “I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.

I recalled the famous description of activist campaigns, usually attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Ideas are activists of a sort; first they appear on the shadows and margins, then they’re mocked or reviled, then they come to be what everyone has always known or believed. How they arrived and who scoffed at them are forgotten. Now nearly everyone understands that this continent was inhabited for centuries before the Europeans arrived, knows that the Columbian encounter was violent and ugly, recognizes that native people are still here. Many of the most significant changes are changes of view, incremental and often invisible, both in who brought them about and when they established themselves, but from those changes much flows.

I don't know about you, but I always try to see the silver lining in everything. Take for example the famous saying 'when shit hits the fan.' To me shit hitting the fan is a good thing. It's easier to swallow and digest shit that has been chopped into little pieces or turned into puree, than it is to try to deep throat a huge log someone just laid.

In May of 1952, about a dozen individuals lead by Fidel Castro formed a group of anti-Batista rebels called “The Movement.” Fidel Castro had become a well-known activist and wrote articles intended to fire up the public in an underground newspaper El Acusador (The Accuser). In one year, his group grew to about 1,200 people. They began accumulating weapons with the idea that they would openly attack a Batista stronghold as a uniformed militant force. Being careful, Castro kept his intentions secret and only a few people knew that the target would be the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack on the second largest military barracks in Cuba, named after General Guillermón Moncada, a hero of the War of Independence, was worked out in the tiny two-room apartment of Abel Santamaría. Abel and his sister Haydée lived on the corner of 25th and O Streets in El Vedado, Havana. Only Abel, Haydée and seven other people were entrusted with the details of the attack. Tight security was maintained throughout and since the volunteers of the revolution were divided into cells, few of them knew each other…. One hundred and thirty two men and two women went up against 1,000 trained soldiers and although the battle ended badly for the Castro brothers, the attack on the barracks caused a public fury throughout Cuba. At his sentencing for leading the failed mission, Fidel delivered his famous “History will Absolve Me” speech. Read more in “The Exciting Story of Cuba.

Castine is a quiet town with a population of about 1,500 people in Western Hancock County, Maine, named after John Hancock, when Maine was a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He was the famous statesman, merchant and smuggler who signed the “Declaration of Independence” with a signature large enough so that the English monarch, King George, could read it without glasses. Every child in New England knows that John Hancock was a prominent activist and patriot during the colonial history of the United States and not just the name of a well-known Insurance Company. Just below the earthen remains of Fort George, on both sides of Pleasant Street, lays the campus of Maine Maritime Academy. Prior to World War II, this location was the home of the Eastern State Normal School, whose purpose was to train grade school teachers. Maine Maritime Academy has significantly grown over the years and is now a four-year college that graduates officers and engineers for the United States Merchant Marine, as well as educating students in marine-related industries such as yacht and small craft management. Bachelor Degrees are offered in Engineering, International Business and Logistics, Marine Transportation, and Ocean Studies. Graduate studies are offered in Global Logistics and Maritime Management, as well as in International Logistics Management. Presently there are approximately 1,030 students enrolled at the Academy. Maine Maritime Academy's ranking was 7th in the 2016 edition of Best Northern Regional Colleges by U.S. News and World Report. The school was named the Number One public college in the United States by Money Magazine. Photo Caption: Castine, Maine

Aida Manduley, LCSW, is a Latinx activist, trauma-focused clinician with a basis in liberation health and healing justice, and a human discotheque. They say, The biggest lie that we’re told—and I would say that this goes for everyone, just in different flavors—the lie that we’re told is that we have to do it by ourselves. No one does anything by themselves. Any person who says they got to where they are by themselves is lying, either actively lying or deeply misinformed and spouting a lie. Look, find me any famous person, find me any philosopher, find me any person who’s made it into the history books. A huge reason why they were able to is because they had people making their food and caring for their children, driving their cars, or horse buggies or whatever. None of these people did it by themselves. The fact that they got help was just erased. So now, other people think, “Oh, well, I gotta do it myself. This other person did it, so clearly, I gotta do it, too.” That’s not how it worked for them either. Actually, they got a lot of help.

discovered, she had tired of what she was doing. Her contract with Derval for the Folies performances was coming to an end. Pepito decided to focus on making her as famous as possible, and he arranged a long tour to 25 countries in Europe and South America. Before starting the tour,

The activist bell hooks famously noted that the absence of structural critique was very revealing: Sandberg’s definition of feminism begins and ends with the notion that it’s all about gender equality within the existing social system. From this perspective, the structures of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy need not be challenged.… No matter their standpoint, anyone who advocates feminist politics needs to understand the work does not end with the fight for equality of opportunity within the existing patriarchal structure. We must understand that challenging and dismantling patriarchy is at the core of contemporary feminist struggle—this is essential and necessary if women and men are to be truly liberated from outmoded sexist thinking and actions.20

India is famous for its cottage industries, but one cottage industry that seems to be thriving is that of bleeding-heart activists who crawl out of the woodworks at every opportunity, talking of how evil our forces are, and in the same breath not hesitating to glorify terrorists as innocent victims.

Educators who teach low-income and nonwhite students can take steps to combat these gaps in political attitudes and civic engagement. First, we can go beyond the typical list of famous activists of color and introduce students to “ordinary” role models, people who share their racial, ethnic, cultural, and/or class-related characteristics, live and/or work locally, may be relatively unknown, and are effectively engaged in civic or political action. We can teach students that the ordinary, everyday acts taken by these people make significant differences to their communities. Finally, we can help students identify and practice the key skills deployed by these “ordinary” role models as a means of becoming efficacious, engaged civic and political actors themselves.

Kensi Gounden writing the biography of famous American lawyer Thurgood Marshall, originally Thorough good Marshall, (born July 2, 1908, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died January 24, 1993, Bethesda), lawyer, civil rights activist, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court’s first African American member. As an attorney, he successfully argued before the Court the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared unconstitutional racial segregation in American public schools.

meet their goal of 80 percent renewable energy by 2050.12 While not having children is definitively the best choice for the environment, it is not the choice that many environmentalists make, however. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, has one child, as does Bill McKibben, who has energized a generation of young climate activists, and Michael Mann, the climate scientist behind the famous “hockey stick” figure showing rapid global warming. As my husband and I were trying to decide whether to have a child or not, I could not help but look at the choices that those around me had made.

Archbishop Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara of Brazil, who once famously said, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint; but when I ask why there are poor, they call me a communist.