Social Activism Quotes

“You decide your own level of involvement.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“We can all make a difference in the lives of others in need, because it is the most simple of gestures that make the most significant of differences.”
― Miya Yamanouchi

“Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I do what I can,' I said. 'When I can do more, I will. You know that.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Wrong is an addictive, repetitive story; Right is where the movement is.”
― Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

“No genuine change in society ever occurs without the mass public getting behind a cause. The good guys in government are counting on enough of us common people waking up and demanding more rights and greater freedoms.”
― James Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy

“The church wanted us to give out food to malnourished children, but they didn't want us to question why they were malnourished to begin with.”
― Elvia Alvarado, Don't Be Afraid, Gringo

“But if you sit around thinking what to do and end up not doing anything, why bother even thinking about it? You're better off going out on the town and having a good time. No, we have to think and act. That's what we're doing here, and that's what you have to do.”
― Elvia Alvarado, Don't Be Afraid, Gringo

“You try to separate yourselves from history. You pretend its ugliness could never happen where you are. But it can...and it does, when normal people, en mass, allow worse and worse shit to go down because either they're too ignorant to understand or they're being corrupted by the powers that control the country. That's how this starts, that's how it gets too far. PLEASE see the signs. Please. This is human nature...to miss the boat out of fear or anger about others "taking what's ours" and so we allow (or cheer on) heinousness one step at a time until, before you know it, you're living in a nightmare of epic proportions and history sees you as the villain you became.

DON'T BECOME A VILLAIN. BE THE VOICE THAT BREAKS THE INSANITY OPEN.”
― Jennifer DeLucy

“Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.”
― Elena Ferrante

“Dear Men Everywhere,
Please don't think that being a feminist means we hate you or don't need you. -We absolutely love you and couldn't live without you! ...We are just on a mission to be treated equally and with respect. No hard feelings.
With love, Feminists of the World xoxoox
P.S. Yes we do shave our legs!”
― Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women

“They [the church] wanted us to give food out to malnourished mothers and children, but they didn't want us to question why we were malnourished to begin with. They wanted us to grow vegetables on the tiny plots around our houses, but they didn't want us to question why we didn't have enough land to feed ourselves. [p. 16]”
― Elvia Alvarado, Don't Be Afraid, Gringo

“An Act of Dissent is simply a way of saying, 'No, I do not accept this and, as my silence may be construed as acquiescence, I would like to make a small gesture to indicate that you can all go fuck yourselves.”
― Mark Thomas, 100 Acts of Minor Dissent

“As she climbed down from the stage, I thought: This is what courage is. It's not just living through the nightmare, it's doing something with it afterward. It's being brave enough to talk about it to other people. It's trying to organize to change things.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“We have traded our intimacy for social media, our romantic bonds for dating matches on apps, our societal truth for the propaganda of corporate interests, our spiritual questioning for dogmatism, our intellectual curiosity for standardized tests and grading, our inner voices for the opinions of celebrities and hustler gurus and politicians, our mindfulness for algorithmic distractions and outrage, our inborn need to belong to communities for ideological bubbles, our trust in scientific evidence for the attractive lies of false leaders, our solitude for public exhibitionism.

We have ignored the hunter-gatherer wisdom of our past, obedient now to the myth of progress.

But we must remember who we are and where we came from.

We are animals born into mystery, looking up at the stars. Uncertain in ourselves, not knowing where we are heading. We exist with the same bodies, the same brains, as Homo sapiens from thousands of years past, roaming on the plains, hunting in forests and by the sea, foraging together in small bands.

Except now, our technology is exponentially increasing at a scale that we cannot predict.

We are overwhelmed with information; lost in a matrix that we do not understand.

Our civilizational “progress” is built on the bones of the indigenous and the poor and the powerless.

Our “progress” comes at the expense of our land, and oceans, and air.

We are reaching beyond what we can globally sustain. Former empires have perished from their unrestrained greed for more resources. They were limited in past ages by geography and capacity, collapsing in regions, and not over the entire planet.

What will be the cost of our progress?

We have grown arrogant in our comfort, hardened away from our compassion, believing that our reality is the only reality.

Yet even at our most uncertain, there are still those saints who are unknown and nameless, who help even when they do not need to help.

They often are not rich, don’t have their profiles written up in magazines, and will never win any prestigious awards.

They may have shared their last bit of food while already surviving on so little. They may have cherished the disheartened, shown warmth to the neglected, tended to the diseased and dying, spoken kindly to the hopeless.

They do not tremble in silence while the wheels of prejudice crush over their land.
Withering what was once fertile into pale death and smoke.

They tend to what they love, to what they serve.

They help, even when they could fall back into ignorance, even when they could prosper through easy greed, even when they could compromise their values, conforming into groupthink for the illusion of security.

They help.”
― Bremer Acosta

“It is relatively easy to point fingers at political figures whose leadership tactics resulted in diminished optimism and increased despair during a time when millions of souls were starving for the exact opposite. It is not so easy to ask how one may have contributed to the creation and maintenance of the culture of disregard and discord which helped spawn the tragedy in the first place.”
― Aberjhani, Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind : Adventures & Misadventures in Literary Savannah

“Literasi bukan hanya sekadar membaca teks, melainkan pula diartikan sebagai kemampuan membaca keadaan sekitar.”
― Roem Topatimasang, Sekolah itu Candu

“It is incumbent upon us to do what we can, even if we cannot do much.”
― David Smail, Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

“Why petition Parliament, at all, to do that for us, which, were they ever so well disposed, we can do more speedily and more effectively for ourselves.”
― Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, Or, an Inquiry Into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery

“The typical active feminist is neither a fiery demonstrator nor a brilliant public speaker: like most successful social activists, she makes innumerable telephone calls, writes innumerable memos, waits for hours in the antechambers of those in power, attends committee meetings night after night, and is always behind with her correspondence.”
― Maren Lockwood Carden, Feminism in the Mid-1970s: The Non-establishment, the Establishment & the Future

“What the research is showing us is that the feeling of being in a collective is really an essential part of [social activism]. We have that famous quote from Bill McKibben when he's asked, what's the one thing I can do to solve this problem? What's one thing? And he says, stop being just I, stop just being you. Start to see yourself in this broader collective, start to plug in to a collective, because a collective actually has kind of the effects that are, the sum is greater than the parts. And I use the metaphor of the choir, right? When you're in a choir, and you're lots of people singing, and you need to catch your breath, or maybe you have a little frog in your throat or something, you can take a moment out and kind of settle your body again, get your voice back, knowing that the rest of the choir is carrying that song. Whereas if you feel like you're the only one singing, there's no space for that, right? And so you just keep singing, and you just sing through the suffering of it.”
― Sarah Jaquette Ray

“There's some really interesting research that shows that action towards climate change in fact doesn't address climate anxiety, it doesn't alleviate our sense of despair about climate change, that action in a collective is the essential thing. And so there's a sort of misnomer that happens. There's a misunderstanding that if we do some actions, we'll feel better. But in fact, it's the collective part that makes us feel better, and less so the action itself. And so the collective makes us feel efficacious, the collective has that social contagion factor of hope and joy and pleasure.”
― Sarah Jaquette Ray

“Do you think that if we all look the same, it’s going to magically solve all our problems?

It won’t. People will long to be different, and in their quest to differentiate themselves, will drive the chaos leading us back to where we are today.

Instead, let’s embrace our differences, be happy, and be done with it.”
― S. Christopher Hunley

“We paint others as monsters to stop ourselves from being the monsters.”
― Ray Celestin, Palace of Shadows