“By thinking globally I can analyze all phenomena, but when it comes to acting, it can only be local and on a grassroots level if it is to be honest, realistic, and authentic.”
Source: Perspectives on Our Age
“In order to have a happy ending, in order to be triumphant, in order to be heroic, you have to tell your own story. The women's movement knows that; black people know that; brown people know that; yellow people know that. You have to be able to tell your own story in order to show that you are worthy--that you belong.”
Source: Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking At The Harlem Renaissance Through Poems
“We cannot fully create effective movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working towards that end. When wounded individuals come together in groups to make change our collective struggle it is often undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally.”
Source: Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery
“Divinity means unfolding and expressing life in new ways. Divinity means radiating peace, bliss and beauty in the world. Divinity means overcoming the limitations of nature in new ways.”
Source: Walking the Path of Compassion
“If you can create a social movement that people want to join, they will bend their energies and ideas to you.”
Source: The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
“Collectively speaking, if we chart the internal mood of every successful movement for social integration we find that, ironically, with each advance made it is anger—not hope, much less elation—that deepens in the petitioners at the gate. Ironic but not surprising: to petition repeatedly is to be reminded repeatedly that one is not wanted, never had been, never will be.”
Source: The Men in My Life
“Social movements are understood in relations to the openings they instigate in the political constellation of society as well as the closures that inevitably follow such openings.”
Source: A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and Fadai Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979
“I have always mistrusted the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants," because although I respect and pay homage to the brilliance and resilience of my ancestors, I'm fairly certain that they were not giants, but as powerful and as vulnerable as I am.”
“But what really changes society are social movements, shifting how we think about things.”
“The story of white power as a social movement exposes something broader about the enduring impact of state violence in America. It reveals one catastrophic ricochet of the Vietnam War, in the form of its paramilitary aftermath. It also reveals something important about war itself. War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.”
Source: Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America