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...

You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things.

Sometimes your light shines so bright that it blinds people from seeing who you really are.

Mental illness is not a fraternity or a social club for like minds. It is its own religion to each person that has it. Their mind is their pastor, their feelings are their scriptures and their delusions are their own bible story. To break them free, is to break their faith in signs. That is...

I existed on my own terms. I was different my entire life. Some called me divergent, wild, crazy, unpredictable and unconformed—an apostate to the rules of the majority. I called myself God’s creation and found purpose in the madness. When that day came, I didn’t allow other people to dictate how I should feel or...

Awareness without action is worthless.

Songs are dangerous, songs are subversive and can change your life.

To congratulate oneself on one’s warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.

Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you’re it

We urgently need to do – and I mean actually do – something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don’t think we will.I think we’re fucked.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

This isn’t about keeping mountains looking pretty. Ending mountaintop removal is about keeping humanity alive.

We’ve got to make change our national pastime and hold protests more regularly than weekend parties.

When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can’t eat money.

It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your...

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

And to those who would choose the safety of inaction over the danger of taking a stand, I have this to say:You bloody cowards. May you have the world that you deserve.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from plants that died long ago. We can give thanks to these ancestors of our present-pay foliage, but we can’t give back to them. We can, however, give forward. When we are unable to return the favor, we can pay it forward to someone or something else. Using...

Why build entirely new systems for connecting to Christ consciousness when the institutions—whether Methodist, Lutheran, or Baptist—have already been created?

Maybe the same essential download was also being delivered to other people—a massive, compassionate battalion of us—at the same time.

…There’s forty-two thousand jobs, near ten thousand of ’em got by people like us. Everyone’s gotta eat. Industry feeds ’em. They figure Little Bear here’s gonna clean it up.” He squeezed his baby, a dimpled plump girl with tufts of jet-black hair.”Paa paa ba baaa!” she said. It was time for a nap.Lou sipped from...

Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied – they don’t after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else.

Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. They wanted to act, to do something, to make life better for other people—and they have.

Think about it: virtually every atrocity in the history of humankind was enabled by a populace that turned away from a reality that seemed too painful to face, while virtually every revolution for peace and justice has been made possibly by a group of people who chose to bear witness and demanded that others bear...

The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action.

Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

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

I told my class the other day I have no idea what judicial activism is, … Maybe the best definition of a judicial activist is a judge you don’t like.

The academic and writer Sara Ahmed has written brilliantly about the idea of the feminist killjoy, and why it should be embraced – because feminism isn’t about making everyone around the table feel comfortable. It’s about being disruptive, challenging, and changing the terms of the debate, so that, over time, almost certainly with discomfort and...

I will act now. I will act now. I will act now. Henceforth, I will repeat these words each hour, each day, everyday, until the words become as much a habit as my breathing, and the action which follows becomes as instinctive as the blinking of my eyelids. With these words I can condition my...

A little difference is still different.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

It is not my place to offer pep talks, aphorisms, or dictums. But if I had to give one piece of practical advice it would be this: Find something that you love that they’re fucking with and then fight for it. If everyone did that–imagine the difference. (50)

Why do you live out here? You’re a great healer; you could get work in the inner city if you wanted to. Even in E-star, I bet.” “Well, I just don’t want to live anywhere else,” She looked up, smiling so that the lines at the edges of her eyes crinkled. As she looked out...

A critical element in nearly all effective social movements is leadership. For it is through smart, persistent, and authoritative leaders that a movement generates the appropriate concepts and language that captures the frustration, anger, or fear of the group’s members and places responsibility where it is warranted.

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises ‘Why then are you not taking part in them?

I detect the activist returning with a vengence.

It is the nature of physics to hear the loudest of mouths over the most comprehensive ones.

Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?

Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.

The world is on fire! Why am I sitting in front of my computer? It is because I don’t have a fire extinguisher for the world, and there isn’t a global 911 to call.

The most effective form of activism is kindness.

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.

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

One of the most important skills we can develop for collapse is thecapacity to listen.

None of us really has any idea how many lives we touch or what impact we have on those lives. In most cases, we will never get to see whatdifference we made, but living out loud isn’t about noticing the results. It is about doing what we came here to do, for no reason other...

For a man who makes his salvation perfect through suffering, is more of a saint and a loving hero of nature.

somebody” that will remove the obstacles they encountered out of the pathway for others.

You didn’t choose God. He chose you. When you stop feeling hurt by everyone and plotting your comeback, he has some very important things he wants you to accomplish with your life.