Bridget McElroy > Bridget's Quotes

“Rage — whether in reaction to social injustice, or to our leaders’ insanity, or to those who threaten or harm us — is a powerful energy that, with diligent practice, can be transformed into fierce compassion.”
― Bonnie Myotai Treace

“I am a person who is unhappy with things as they stand. We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things.”
― Hugo Claus

“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”
― William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!”
― Audre Lorde

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
― Audre Lorde

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
― Mary Oliver

“Nothing is impossible to a determined woman.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott

“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.”
― Paulo Coelho, Brida

“Be crazy! But learn how to be crazy without being the center of attention. Be brave enough to live different.”
― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”
― Paulo Coelho

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“It takes great courage to open one's heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world.”
― Vincent A. Gallagher, The True Cost of Low Prices: The Violence of Globalization

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
― Elie Wiesel

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings

“I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”
― Cornel West

“The country is in deep trouble. We've forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. We need the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that's the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.”
― Cornel West

“I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.”
― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
― Mother Teresa

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”
― Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary