"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
— Anne Frank

"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

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace."
— John Lennon

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
— Walt Whitman

"Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."
— Malcolm X

"A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things."
— Barack Obama

"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
— George Bernard Shaw

"At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.
We will be judged by "I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in."
— Mother Teresa

"Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room."
— Bill Gates

"Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence."
— Publius Ovidius Naso

"We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary."
— Malcolm X

"I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action."
— Malcolm X

"As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"How wonderful it is that no one has to wait, but can start right now to gradually change the world."
— Anne Frank

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden)

"We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away."
— M.T. Anderson (Feed)

"It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen."
— Aristotle (Etica Nicomaquea & Politica)

"Buddhism holds that everything is in constant flux. Thus the question is whether we are to accept change passively and be swept away by it or whether we are to take the lead and create positive changes on our own initiative. While conservatism and self-protection might be likened to winter, night, and death, the spirit of pioneering and attempting to realize ideals evokes images of spring, morning, and birth."
— Daisaku Ikeda

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
— Frederick Douglass

"The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity."
— Marcus Garvey

"Every day I get better at knowing that it is not a choice to be an activist; rather, it is the only way to hold on to the better parts of my human self. It is the only way I can live and laugh without guilt."
— Staceyann Chin

"If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
— Aboriginal Activsts' Group (of which Lila Watson was a member), Queensland, 1970s

"If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist."
— Jenny Holzer (Jenny Holzer: Truisms And Essays)

"Thou shalt not stand idly by..."
— Leviticus, 19:16

"I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist. "
— Susan Sarandon

"If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist."
— Joseph Sobran

""Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes." ~ ' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes." -"
— Clare Boothe Luce

"The 1970s-80s social movement called U.S. third world feminism functioned as a central locus of possibility, an insurgent social movement that shattered the construction of any one ideology as the single most correct site where truth can be represented. Indeed, without making this kind of metamove, any 'liberation' or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself, and become trapped inside a drive for truth that ends only in producing its own brand of dominations. What U.S. third world feminism thus demanded was a new subjectivity, a political revision that denied any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical subjectivity with the capactiy to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved. These dynamics are what were required in the shift from enacting a hegemonic oppositional theory and practice to engaging in the differential form of social movement, as performed by U.S. feminists of color during the post-World War II period of great social transformation. p. 58-59. "
— Chela Sandoval (Methodology of the Oppressed)

"Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible."
— Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark)

"War...is ugly and brutalizing, and the nobility is in doing it without becoming ugly and brutalizing."
— Dana Kramer-Rolls (Way of the Cat: Nap, Do Nothing and Stretch Your Way to a Blissful Life)

"People would rather believe than know."
— Edward O. Wilson

"Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early successes, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same as optimism."
— Vaclav Havel

"When you start to care, you can't stop. But the more you care, the more it burdens you. And you start asking yourself: is it even worth it?"
— Ahmed Al-Omran

"With all these occurances of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom,, the for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear to be the boundaries and smack against them like a heart against the rib cage. If we reveal boundaries in the course of our movements, then we will expose the inherent lie in the use of the word freedom. I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect. I don't know what's ahead of me in the course of my life and this civilization. I just don't feel I have reached the necessary things inside my history that would ease the pressure in my skull and in my future and in my present. It is exhausting, living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them."
— David Wojnarowicz

"As you get to thirty, the main thing is to not be sensible."
— Mark Steel

"An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. "
— Anthony Standen