Small Acts of Courage Quotes

“We talk far too much about citizenship as the acquisition of rights when we ought to be talking about it as the assumption of responsibilities.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“great-grandparents knew, despite their total lack of a formal education. Justice isn’t justice until it’s universal. Equality isn’t equality until it’s universal. Democracy isn’t democracy until it’s universal.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“involved process of securing my O-1 work visa and negotiating with CNN to sponsor me for a green card if everything worked and I decided to stay longer, and as all that was set in motion I was given an official start date: Monday, September 10, 2001.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“Our kitchen table was a place of open debate. We kept the traditions that were important to us, Indian food and Indian movies with my grandmother and religious instruction at the jamatkhana, but outside of those things, my parents believed that good things come from exposing yourself to lots of different ideas. Never once did they think of these outside influences as diluting or diminishing who we were or what was important to us.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“and my father subscribed as a way of helping him out. What my father didn’t know, and didn’t find out until years later, was that this guy didn’t have a car. He was doing it all by public transportation. He would get your grocery list, buy everything the night before, store it at his apartment, then take the bus and the subway around in the predawn hours hauling bags and bags of groceries to people’s homes. Later in life, after graduating from hand-delivering groceries to other successes in business, this man donated $100,000 to a local hospital.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“Canada is a vast country. It covers more than six percent of the landmass on the planet, second only to Russia and bigger than China. Yet while China manages to hold nearly 1.5 billion people, Canada is home to fewer than 40 million, and almost all of them live within one hundred miles of the American border, mostly concentrated in major urban areas like Toronto and Vancouver. Those”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“morphed into part of the global freedom struggle for African independence. Having just fought a war against Germany to liberate Jewish people from concentration camps, the British now found themselves having to make a moral case for concentration camps of their own, and the stated rationale for England’s imperial adventure—that it had been the white man’s burden to civilize his little brown brothers for whom Christ also died—began to collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“The response from the colonial government was brutal and swift. In October 1952, it declared a state of emergency that would last for the next eight years. African political parties were outlawed, and nearly eighty thousand men, mostly Kikuyu, were captured and relocated to “reeducation camps,” the ostensible purpose of which was to rehabilitate them into good, submissive Africans. In reality they were forced labor camps where men were beaten and put to work building roads and airports and any other infrastructure the British required. In the process of being “reeducated,” thousands of Africans died. The brutality of Britain’s crackdown, naturally, had the opposite of its intended effect. It did not quash the rebellion. It inflamed it, and what began as a regional fight over land reclamation quickly”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“the struggle for independence began to break out across Africa in the wake of World War II, more and more Indians found themselves uncomfortable staying in the middle. And once the fight for Kenya’s independence began in earnest, at some point you had to pick a side. As my father always told me, “In politics, if you sit on the fence, you get a splinter up your ass.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“Africans could be counted as “subjects” without being accorded the rights of “citizens.” Indeed, decades later when several Kenyans tried to sue the United Kingdom for human rights abuses, the British defense was “We were not in charge. We were not the government. The whites in Kenya were the colonial government, and the responsibility lies with them.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“By the time the Scramble for Africa was done, the French, British, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Belgians had taken some ten thousand different and distinct ethnic groups, each with its own culture and traditions; divvied them up; and sorted them into forty brand-new colonies, dominions, mandates, and protectorates. As in Natal, all of these designations were different legal mechanisms dreamed up to justify the brute-force annexation of property. Or to put it more simply: a way to keep the natives in their place in order to plunder their goods and rape their women. More than anything, these various colonial structures were a means of exerting control without having to assume accountability, meaning”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“What followed was the aptly named “Scramble for Africa.” Starting in 1885, the nations of Europe convened at conferences in Berlin, Paris, London, and Brussels, where they pored over maps of Africa, carving out chunks for their own needs and arguing over who would get what. All of this was done with zero regard for the African people. Drawing arbitrary lines on inaccurate maps, the European powers took traditional kingdoms, tribes, and language groups that had existed for hundreds of years and randomly sliced them up or smashed them together, often on nothing more than the whim of some European monarch who’d never even set foot south of the French Riviera. Quite famously, Queen Victoria of England “gave” Mount Kilimanjaro to Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany as a birthday present, transferring a massive chunk of land from the control of one nation to another without the slightest thought for how it might affect the people who actually lived there.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“Gandhi’s aim, in his words, was to teach young minds “to conquer hate by love, untruth by truth, violence by self-sacrifice.” More than giving students this set of skills, Tolstoy Farm also instilled a moral code by which to live. “The best way to find yourself,” Gandhi wrote, “is to lose yourself in the service of others,” a lesson Rajabali took to heart.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“First was Henry David Thoreau, the American transcendentalist known for writing Walden and the essay “Civil Disobedience.” Second was the English writer John Ruskin, whose essay “Unto This Last” inspired Gandhi to promote equality regardless of race or nationality. Third, and perhaps most important, was the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who in 1902 was nominated for both the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize. Tolstoy had written extensively on the idea of using a nonviolent approach to fighting oppression. Tolstoy himself referred to this approach as nonresistance. Gandhi would take the concept and make it his own, using the term passive resistance.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy

“was through the comparative study of religion and talks with scholars that he came to the conclusion that all religions contained elements of truth worthy of consideration. He embraced the Hindu concept of aparigraha, or “nonpossession,” the imperative to jettison the burdens of money and property that weigh life down. He embraced the idea of samabhava, or “equability,” a stoicism that allows people to remain calm, controlled, and self-assured both in victory and in defeat, to persevere regardless of the odds of success or failure. He also embraced the African concept of ubuntu, being assured enough in yourself that you are open and available to others while also knowing that the suffering and humiliation of others will only bring suffering and humiliation on you. He celebrated the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, that we have a responsibility to live our lives in a way that repairs the fabric of the world.”
― Ali Velshi, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy