Famous quotes by Activists

"It would be good for us Africans to accept ourselves as we are and recapture some of the positive aspects of our culture"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: the forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"And so I'm saying that, yes, colonialism was terrible, and I describe it as a legacy of wars, but we ought to be moving away from that by now"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"That's the way I do things when I want to celebrate, I always plant a tree. And so I got an indigenous tree, called Nandi Flame, it has this beautiful red flowers. When it is in flower, it is like it is in flame"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"I am working to make sure we don't only protect the environment, we also improve governance"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"You cannot blame the mismanagement of the economy or the fact that we have not invested adequately in education in order to give our people the knowledge, the skills and the technology that they need in order to be able to use the resources that Africa has to gain wealth"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"It is important to nurture any new ideas and initiatives which can make a difference for Africa"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"I know there is pain when sawmills close and people lose jobs, but we have to make a choice. We need water and we need these forests"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to conserve the environment, so that we can bequeath our children a sustainable world that benefits all"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"When I first started, it was really an innocent response to the needs of women in rural areas. When we started planting trees to meet their needs, there was nothing beyond that. I did not see all the issues that I have to come to deal with"

Wangari Maathai, Activist

"A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space"

Gloria Steinem, Activist

"It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate"

Gloria Steinem, Activist

"I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing"

Gloria Steinem, Activist

"I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal"

Gloria Steinem, Activist

"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn"

Gloria Steinem, Activist

"God must have been on leave during the Holocaust"

Simon Wiesenthal, Activist

"When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity"

Simon Wiesenthal, Activist

"Humour is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them"

Simon Wiesenthal, Activist

"You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution"

Huey Newton, Activist

"The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishment's hand. They make the racist secure in his racism"

Huey Newton, Activist

"If you stop struggling, then you stop life"

Huey Newton, Activist

"Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself"

Jane Addams, Activist

"Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be"

Emma Goldman, Activist

"The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul"

Emma Goldman, Activist

"The most violent element in society is ignorance"

Emma Goldman, Activist

"No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action"

Emma Goldman, Activist

"The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive"

Betty Friedan, Activist

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