Youth Activists Quotes

Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.

To say nothing is saying something. You must denounce things you are against or one might believe that you support things you really do not.

You say that you love your children above everything else. And yet you are stealing their future.

...But it is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of a few.

The real power belongs to the people.

You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard. Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?

One of the most enduring lessons I learned in my youth: Activists do not save the masses. The masses save themselves. Activists, like politicians, are just there to take credit for it.

So we can’t save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change. And it has to start today. So everyone out there: it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.

Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively we might say: The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.

We live in a strange world, where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things. Where a football game or a film gala gets more media attention than the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. Where celebrities, film and pop stars who have stood up against all injustices will not stand up for our environment and for climate justice because that would inflict on their right to fly around the world visiting their favourite restaurants, beaches and yoga retreats.

You don’t need money to be generous. You don’t need education to be wise. You don’t need fame to be important. You don’t need charisma to be influential. You don’t need titles to be honorable. You don’t need awards to be special. You don’t need medals to be extraordinary. You don’t need consent to be yourself. You don’t need approval to be unique. You don’t need a license to be creative. You don’t need authorization to dream. You don’t need acceptance to be gifted. You don’t need youth to be a champion. You don’t need old age to be a hero. You need skill, not temper, to be a warrior. You need love, not rage, to be an activist. You need compassion, not robes, to be a priest. You need confidence, not ego, to be a politician. You need integrity, not charm, to be a leader. You need wisdom, not theories, to be a master. You need character, not size, to be a champion.

We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do. We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

Those of us who are still children can’t change what you do now once we’re old enough to do something about it.

We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

So we can’t save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change. And it has to start today. So everyone out there: it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.

Today, as young French and Dutch Muslims wander through Upper Manhattan and Chicago’s South Side, it’s not uncommon to see European politicians, journalists, and activists in those same urban areas, visiting mosques and community centers trying to identify “best practices” they can take back home.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, Ave could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb. They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips—their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

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’.

Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively, we might say: the pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes; on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? No thank you, he will think. Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past. Not only the reality of work done, and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.

for the next week we endured what can only be described as verbal abuse from anti-equality Christians. Truly, not all of those opposing marriage equality were mean spirited. Some were nice enough, and went so far as to offer us water and snacks. Too many others, though, were just plain unkind, and too few of the good Christians who stood nearby did anything to rein them in. The most harrowing moment for me came when a prominent ex-gay activist pointed at my clergy collar and yelled, “You’re not fooling anyone with that thing!” He yelled that I was not a real pastor, and that I had simply bought a clergy shirt to try to deceive others. When I replied that I was an ordained minister he looked incredulous and told me to read the Bible. (I let him know that I’d read it cover to cover, in English and the original Hebrew and Greek.) Fuming, he told me I was going to hell. Before I could respond Heidi grabbed my shoulder and guided me away. The incident left me shaken, not so much for me, but for Christians everywhere. Too often progressive Christians have ceded the public proclamation of Christian values to conservatives and fundamentalists. If you asked the youth and young adults who were with us in that hallway that week what Christians thought of them, they would likely have believed that the vast majority of Christians hated them. That was true, even with Heidi, myself, and a moderate number of other supportive clergy visible and engaged. This is probably not all that surprising to you if you are a progressive Christian. If you’re anything like me, you roll your eyes in frustration every time a right-wing extremist clergy person claims to offer the “Christian perspective” on an issue. Or,

To me everyone is equal, until they feel the urge to offer advise based on some stroneage tradition. That moment, I stop considering them as equal humans, and start treating them as adolescent children. Whenever you feel the audacity to advise a reformer, ask yourself this - what exactly have you done for the society that makes you qualified to judge a reformer? I sacrificed my youth for the world. What have you done? I put off starting a family for the world. What have you done? I obliterated my national and cultural identity for the world. What have you done? Till you've abolished the last trace of active bigotry, intolerance and fanatical fantasies from your mind, don't you dare touch my work. Everybody can quote Naskar, not everybody can accompany Naskar.

In the weeks following my arrest, many of my family members were rounded up by the military as a form of collective punishment for what I had done and for the global attention it had garnered. In a single night, six of my relatives were arrested in predawn raids. Israel’s notoriously racist far-right defense minister justified the arrests by saying, “Dealing with Tamimi and her family has to be severe, exhaust all legal measures and generate deterrence.” And so, the occupation forces continued to target and punish my relatives. It got so bad that some of the parents, with the help of local activists, organized teach-ins to prepare the youth in the village for arrest, blindfolding them to simulate the experience. They also carried out mock interrogations and educated them about their rights.

On that evening at the Red Fort function, Soni and a couple of her Youth Congress activists got hold of a boy who was barely out of his teens. She ordered the others present, including the police, to thrash the boy. Virendra being Virendra felt it necessary to intervene and chide Soni: ‘Why are you beating this boy? What has he done? If he has broken any law, the police will look after it. You are not the police.

There is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you.

According to one estimate, of the roughly 1200 foreign fighters captured in Syria between summer 2003 and summer 2005, fully 85 percent were Saudis.24 It is not clear who financed their recruitment, training, and travel from Saudi Arabia to Syria and on to Iraq. It is clear, however, that Wahhabi and Salafi clerics and activists in the kingdom encouraged them to join the anti-Shia, anti-American jihad in Iraq. The sermons that call the youth to jihad in Iraq reek of anti-Americanism, but just as important, if not more so, they echo the old Wahhabi hatred of the Shia. War on America is now war on Shiism, and war on Shiism is war on America.

the idea of a crusade against social modernity was to be found not only in the market towns of north-central Castile, or in the remote rural north (most obviously among the theocratic and pugnacious Carlists of Navarre) but also in larger urban centres and the big cities, where Catholic youth became activists in the new mass organizations of the right.

In order to reach your full potential, you must first believe you have potential. You have unique skills, interests, perspectives, ideas and ways of showing up in the world that make you different than anyone else in the universe. The pain and suffering you feel now will one day be a blurry memory, and your challenges and darkest moments are what make you an inspiration to others. The things that make you different than your peers are the very things that make you important and valuable. Every great leader, activist and change-maker started as a child who chose to take action to change the world. Remind yourself over and over again that have the power to choose; You have the power to choose to embody the best version of yourself; You have the power to choose to make life better for the people and world around you; You have the power to choose the legacy you leave behind. Whoever you want to be and however you want to be remembered, choose that. Never forget you matter, and you choose your life story.

Climate Change is going to affect us all in gargantuan proportions. Hope the youth all around the world join the movement to make the politicians and rich business people realise their role to play.

Youth are absolution to habits of death. Youth are walking illumination manifest.

Illumination Manifest (Youth Sonnet, 1528) Youth are the cure for all dividing insanity. You are the antidote to all bewitching animosity. Don't confuse youth as a measure of agist conventionality. Youth is but a sanctifying dawn, out of the dusk of rigidity. Youth is the spirit of play with the forces of ominosity. Youth is the conquest of death into the daring pastures of duty. Youth are absolution to habits of death. Youth are walking illumination manifest.

To build unity requires recognizing the central role of young activists. They are vigorously fighting the attack on this century's Reconstruction. Their anger at today's ugly society often translates into a passionate drive for unity across color lines.

The following chapters will explore some of the more formalized “content cartels” in further detail, but in seeking to illustrate how backdoor agreements further increase the existing repression, one example stands out: the close relationship between Facebook and the Israeli government. For Palestinians, many of whom are physically cut off from the world by occupation and border controls, the internet is—in the words of author Miriyam Aouragh—“a mediating space through which the Palestinian nation is globally ‘imagined’ and shaped,” bringing together a dispersed diaspora along with a geographically fragmented nation.24 Social media has not only enabled long-lost relatives and friends to come together virtually, but has also provided space for organizing and the development of an alternate narrative to that provided by the mainstream media, which has long privileged the Israeli political position over that of the Palestinian one. But just as Palestinian activist voices have been historically devalued and silenced by mainstream media, so too have they been censored by social media platforms—while Israeli hate speech on the same platforms often goes ignored. In the summer of 2014, a few months after US-brokered peace talks faltered, three Israeli youth were kidnapped and murdered in the occupied West Bank. In retaliation, three Israeli men abducted and murdered a Palestinian teenager, leading to increased tensions, violent clashes, and an increase in rockets fired by Hamas into Israeli territory. Israel responded with airstrikes, raining rockets into Gaza and killing more than two thousand Palestinians and injuring more than ten thousand more—a majority of whom were civilians. As the violence played out on the ground, social media became a secondary battlefield for both sides, as well as their supporters and detractors.

That’s likely why I’m the size I am now—a couple decades of dieting,” says Substantia Jones, a photographer and fat-acceptance activist who now identifies as “a happily fat woman” but spent her youth trying to shrink her body. “Each time I would of course lose weight and then gain it back with a dividend, so I ended up bigger and bigger each time,” she says. When she finally stopped dieting and regained weight for the last time, her weight stabilized—and has not fluctuated significantly since.

You need to listen to us, we who cannot vote. You need to vote for us, for your children and grandchildren. What we are doing now can soon no longer be undone. In this election, you vote for the future living conditions of humankind.

The struggle to name anti-black sentiment and anti-queer sentiment in the early 2000s was a very isolating experience. Further, naming the way that assimilationist politics were framing the LGBTQIA movement in their fight for marriage equality over against homeless queer youth and discrimination was also part and parcel of my work of naming the ways we all capitulate to the logic of the norm, an ever-expansive fold that flattens out differences and demands that we all acquiesce to the dominant culture.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has so often been accused of being fascism’s progenitor that his case requires particular care. Intended for the Lutheran pastorate, the young Nietzsche lost his faith and became a professor of classical philology while still extraordinarily young. For his remaining good years (he suffered permanent mental breakdown at fifty, perhaps related to syphilis) he invested all his brilliance and rage in attacking complacent and conformist bourgeois piety, softness, and moralism in the name of a hard, pure independence of spirit. In a world where God was dead, Christianity weak, and Science false, only a spiritually free “superman” could fight free of convention and live according to his own authentic values. At first Nietzsche inspired mostly rebellious youth and shocked their parents. At the same time, his writing contained plenty of raw material for people who wanted to brood on the decline of modern society, the heroic effort of will needed to reverse it, and the nefarious influence of Jews. Nietzsche himself was scornful of patriotism and the actual anti-Semites he saw around him, and imagined his superman a “free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-worshipper, the dweller in forests.” His white-hot prose exerted a powerful intellectual and aesthetic influence across the political spectrum, from activist nationalists like Mussolini and Maurice Barrès to nonconformists like Stefan George and André Gide, to both Nazis and anti-Nazis, and to several later generations of French iconoclasts from Sartre to Foucault. “Nietzsche’s texts themselves provide a positive goldmine of varied possibilities.

Carmichael also criticized the student peace movement and argued that if peace activists wanted to be relevant to most people, they needed to start organizing to resist the draft: The peace movement has been a failure because it hasn’t gotten off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S [draft deferment] and is not afraid of being drafted anyway. The problem is how you can move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and articulate a position for those white youth who do not want to go. . . . [SNCC is] the most militant organization for peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today. There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. . . . There is a higher law than the law of a racist named [Secretary of Defense] McNamara; there is a higher law than the law of a fool named [Secretary of State] Rusk; there is a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we are going to decide who to kill.89

After it was revealed that the Miami Police Department used images of Black men for target practice, a movement of clergy and other activists initiated the hashtag #UseMeInstead circulating their own, predominantly White photos. In another form of subversive visualization, activists called out the way media outlets circulate unflattering photos of Black youths murdered by police or White vigilantes. They used the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and asked the question “Which one would they use?” with dueling photos of themselves looking stereotypically “thuggish” (e.g. not smiling, wearing a hoodie, throwing up hand signs, smoking, or holding alcohol) and “respectable” (e.g. smiling, wearing a graduation gown or suit, playing with a baby, or wearing a military uniform).

Here are the ominous parallels. Our universities are strongholds of German philosophy disseminating every key idea of the post-Kantian axis, down by now to old-world racism and romanticist technology-hatred. Our culture is modernism worn-out but recycled, with heavy infusions of such Weimarian blends as astrology and Marx, or Freud and Dada, or “humanitarianism” and horror-worship, along with five decades of corruption built on this kind of base. Our youth activists, those reared on the latest viewpoints at the best universities, are the pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected (this time mostly on the political left and addicted to drugs). Our political parties are the Weimar coalition over again, offering the same pressure-group pragmatism, and the same kind of contradiction between their Enlightenment antecedents and their statist commitments. The liberals, more anti-ideological than the moderate German left, have given up even talking about long-range plans and demand more controls as a matter of routine, on a purely ad hoc basis. The conservatives, much less confident than the nationalist German right, are conniving at this routine and apologizing for the remnants of their own tradition, capitalism (because of its clash with the altruist ethics)—while demanding government intervention in or control over the realms of morality, religion, sex, literature, education, science. Each of these groups, observing the authoritarian element in the other, accuses it of Fascist tendencies; the charge is true on both sides. Each group, like its Weimar counterpart, is contributing to the same result: the atmosphere of chronic crisis, and the kinds of controls, inherent in an advanced mixed economy. The result of this result, as in Germany, is the growth of national bewilderment or despair, and of the governmental apparatus necessary for dictatorship. In America, the idea of public ownership of the means of production is a dead issue. Our intellectual and political leaders are content to retain the forms of private property, with public control over its use and disposal. This means: in regard to economic issues, the country’s leadership is working to achieve not the communist version of dictatorship, but the Nazi version. Throughout its history, in every important cultural and political area, the United States, thanks to its distinctive base, always lagged behind the destructive trends of Germany and of the rest of the modern world. We are catching up now. We are still the freest country on earth. There is no totalitarian (or even openly socialist) party of any size here, no avowed candidate for the office of Führer, no economic or political catastrophe sufficient to make such a party or man possible—so far—and few zealots of collectivism left to urge an ever faster pursuit of national suicide. We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully. But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason.

I offered up my youth to lift up the world, even got dumped, while lost in world building. My genes might die with me, not my dream - One day, not long now, whole world will be kin.

Dream Before Genes (The Sonnet) As a teenager I only had one dream - immortality, not fame, not wealth, but immortality. I wanted to live on long after my body had perished, and with sheer conviction I made it a reality. Tomorrow if I fall asleep, I shall sleep contented, for my mission will live on galvanizing brave veins. My only regret is, I never got to raise a family, it's the bittersweet price a reformer has to pay. Abi the person had to be sacrificed, for Naskar the dream to become a reality. Anyone who says, they have no regrets, never dared to live up to their full capacity. I offered up my youth to lift up the world, even got dumped, while lost in world building. My genes might die with me, not my dream - One day, not long now, whole world will be kin.