Top 1200 Social Activism Quotes & Sayings

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.

21st-century activism is different perhaps in the sense that the individual can be more present in the process, especially via social media, but the underlying drivers remain the same as desire to change the status quo.

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

I think a culture can really be elevated through the arts, and it's always a dream come true when I come across roles that enable me to fuse my love of storytelling with my passion for activism and raising social awareness.

Social activism has gone mainstream. A new generation of philanthropic leaders such as Bill and Melinda Gates, and Bono are providing inspiration, guidance, and billions of dollars through their global foundations.

Jack Geiger, for example, was a leader of that movement. He was part of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which was kind of one of the ways that I worked my way into social activism in medicine.

I'm sure my father would applaud the explosion of youth activism that has emerged in response to the gun violence pandemic. I'm certain my parents would agree it is gratifying to see young people leading social change projects in a multiracial coalition.

I think that the activism I've become involved with informs and enhances my life in a lot of ways, and definitely career-wise. This record wouldn't exist [without that activism], for one.

It makes me so angry when people say, "We never hear from people who are happy doing sex work." Well, that's because they're working. The activism privileges people who hated doing sex work, are no longer doing it, and have a job at a social service organization, for example, that trains them on how to speak to the media. We are hearing from those people quite a bit.

Christians often equate holiness with activism and spiritual disciplines. And while it's true that activism is often the outgrowth of holiness and spiritual disciplines are necessary for the cultivation of holiness, the pattern of piety in the Scripture is more explicitly about our character. We put off sin and put on righteousness. We put to death the deeds of the flesh and put on Christ. To use the older language, we pursue mortification of the old man and the vivification of the new.

Eleanor Roosevelt had both her admirers and her detractors. And they admired her and detracted from her for many of the same reasons. People who liked her social activism, who thought that she was calling attention to problems that needed solving, were all for her.

If Americans loved judicial activism, liberals wouldn't be lying about what it is. Judicial activism means making up constitutional rights in order to strike down laws the justices don't like based on their personal preferences. It's not judicial activism to strike down laws because they violate the Constitution.

A spirituality that is only private and self-absorbed, one devoid of an authentic political and social consciousness, does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history. On the other hand, an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness ... will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, however righteous its intentions.

Small businesses forget how to be social. Everyone tries to do social media when they should just try being social. To be successful with social media, you have to treat each individual person just like you would in real life by establishing a genuine connection with them.

Activism is wasteful.

It was clear to us that social movements and activism can only take us so far in our mission.

Hotels are amazing spaces and platform for activism. If they placed voting booths in hotels and other space of hospitality - a lot more people would vote. Voting poll stations aren't easily accessible. These phone booths should be in more hotels and public spaces. Activism is accessibility. Bravo to the Standard for making it possible.

There are some political issues where mainstream press attention only hurts. We think about activism as being this generic model of consciousness-raising, then hopefully media attention, attraction of new people to your cause, building public support for your cause, then decision-makers reacting to that change in public opinion. That's true for some types of activism, but it is not true for all of them.

Not living in fear is a form of activism.

Especially in the sphere of social activism, I think we tend to unwittingly conceptualize progress or revolution as black and white and having a clear beginning and end.

I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.

I think it needs to be with a heart-based wisdom and this heart-based wisdom needs to go hand in hand with science and with social activism and love for our planet and love for our whole human family that spans the whole globe and this may sound very high and mighty or airy-fairy, but it's going to have to go to that or else we're just all going to destroy each other.

My activism always existed. My art gave me the platform to do something about the activism.

I consider myself an 'actorvist.' When I say that, what I mean is that I use my art to inform my activism and to be my activism sometimes, but I also use my activism in my art.

I am, in general, favourable to activism and social movements and hostile to graft and corruption.

My ministry's always been one of social activism. I think a responsible minister must be at some levels involved in the social order.

Men have influenced my activism and feminism both positively and negatively. As most gender differences are social, not genetic, we still need to change what we do and what we expect of each other... The potential exists for societies where men and women do not have to conform to unwanted stereotypes.

From spiritual connection springs kindness, connection, social activism, and love.

You want to know what judicial activism is? Judicial activism is judges imposing their policy preferences on the words of the Constitution.

The New Deal never rethought the draconian racist immigration restriction policies of the 20s, of course, but its electoral base rested significantly on "ethnic" voters, whose activism was both hemmed in and rewarded by the Democrats. Southern and Eastern Europeans were included as secondary leaders of the new industrial unions, and as entitled citizens qualified for social security, unemployment compensation, and fair labor standards protections, even as workers of color were largely left out of key areas of the welfare state.

In the 1980s, Josef Beuys planted the seed that activism could be considered as art. I am influenced by the idea of his idea of social sculpture.

I'll never forget working to get my college, Wayne State University, to divest from the government in South Africa. This was the beginning of my activism, and the fight for social and economic justice has been a constant thread in my life.

People who have come of age from the '80s on have experienced a form of activism that's very sterile and annoying. It's not that much fun to be an activist. That's partly by design. They are sterile protests and anonymous e-mail activism - not the kind of thing where people fall in love, form friendships for life, and see the change they make right in front of them. I've seen that, when people start to experience doing these things together and the power that it has.

Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.

I believe activism is the true source of change in the world. Pushing to change social structures in communities that you are a part of is critical for making real lasting change.

My policing was nothing but activism - it had to be.

Rather than empowering all, consumer and shareholder activism gives greatest voice to those with the most money in their pockets, those who can switch from seller to seller with relative ease. Consumer and shareholder activism is a form of protest that favours the middle classes, an outpouring of the dissatisfaction of the bourgeoisie.

Developing compassion for Congress and politicians is a good way to begin practicing the new social activism if you want to make effective changes in the world. Perhaps the most startling new insight of all is that there is no other way to effectively change the world.

Art is activism.

I wouldn't say all journalism is activism, but I would say most journalism is activism.

Activism is my rent for living on the planet.

For many of these people the social is just a mirror of themselves. I'm not against the social, but I want something genuinely social, not something that has been fetishized as social so that a group of people can feel better about themselves.

We have a problem with judicial activism in this country.

Films can't change the society; they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism.

I've been involved in social activism my entire life, and I would argue that many people involved in social activist movements have done very little work on themselves.

For the progressive left, social activism grounded in faith and theology crested in the 1960s.

All activism is fake activism.

World conditions challenge us to look beyond the status quo for responses to the pain of our times. We look to powers within as well as powers without. A new, spiritually based social activism is beginning to assert itself. It stems not from hating what is wrong and trying to fight it, but from loving what could be and making the commitment to bring it forth.

Activism is in my DNA.

It is my feeling that as we grow older we should become not less radical but more so. I do not, of course, mean this in any political-party sense, but rather in a willingness to struggle for those things in which we passionately believe. Social activism and the struggle for social justice are often thought of as the natural activities of the young but not of the middle-aged or the elderly. In fact, I don't think this was ever true.

I got involved early on in social media - I created one of the first social networks - and for me, social gaming was a natural evolution of that.

Abbie Hoffman's inspiration was, in a sense, inadvertent. I wanted to do something to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Woodstock at the time, and it just happened that Abbie died the same year. Hoffman was always an inspiration to me, for his activism and execution of that activism, and any of his books will give you a guide and a map to creating almost anything, if you apply it to what it is you want to do.

I admire Ai Weiwei for his art and his activism. His art is beautiful in form, and in function embodies the principles of populism and social consciousness I aspire to in my own practice.

I guess because the shows were activist in their own way - the marriage of my public activism and my career activism, you know - people understand me very well. They also understand there's a very strong bipartisan part in all of this.

For one to be free there must be at least two. Freedom signifies a social relation, an asymmetry of social conditions: essentially it implies social difference--it presumes and implies the presence of social division. Some can be free only in so far as there is a form of dependence they can aspire to escape.

The Body Shop Foundation is run by our staff and supports social activism and environmental activism. We don't tend to support big agencies.

Social media and young people, art, music, all communications make this one of the most active times for activism. It will be a time of change.

Writing is a form of activism.

Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism. I feel formally that I've scratched the surface of something very important about the nature of nonfiction film, about what we're very rarely honest about: When you film anybody, they start performing.

Philanthropy is activism.