Socialist Feminists

"Anyone who possessed this overwhelming desire to face near certain death on a regular basis is going to be unusual."

"Whilst I cannot give any confirmation at this stage around fatalities and casualties, what I can say that it is clear that this is one of New Zealand's darkest days. Clearly what has happened here is an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence. Many of those directly affected in this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand. They may even be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home and it is their home. They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us, is not. They have no place in New Zealand. There is no place in New Zealand for such acts of extreme and unprecedented violence, which it is clear that this act was. For now my thoughts, and I'm sure the thoughts of all New Zealanders, are with those who have been affected and also with their families. My thoughts are also with those who are in Christchurch who are still dealing with an unfolding situation."

"I want to bring into question those old assumptions about the character traits we want in politics."

"This is my generation's nuclear-free moment, and I am determined that we will tackle it head on."

"In a period of fear and uncertainty, politicians have the choice of either capitalizing on that, stoking it, and driving it towards someone to blame that isn't the system, because that means that they're not responsible for fixing it. Or they take the harder road, but the right long-term road, which is being open about the issues people face, working really hard to find the solutions, being honest about how long it will take to make a difference."

"[B]lock Offers and their popularity have diminished over time. It’s become less economic, particularly for offshore. We’ve been clear that we need to ensure we’re moving towards just transitions. It is a process for New Zealand to acknowledge that our future is not in fossil fuels. [...] It’s not where our future lies, but my plan is to transition our regions, not to jar them."

"Nowhere is patriarchy's iron fist as naked as in the oppression of animals, which serves as the model and training ground for all other forms of oppression. Its three basic strategies — the club, the yoke, and the leash — operate similarly in the oppression of women and minorities. The club strategy is to kill animals for gain, sadistic pleasure, and the "affirmation of manhood." It is domination through brute force. The yoke strategy is to domesticate animals to carry burdens and pull vehicles; supply eggs, wool, and milk; and provide flesh and skins. It is domination through enslavement. The leash strategy is to tame animals to provide the psychic benefits of direct rule of master over pet. It is domination through deceit. … It is a surprisingly close progression from hunting animals to hunting and torturing people — catching and lynching blacks or "smoking out" Jews during the Holocaust."

"Don't you know that the principal business of women, all down the ages, has been to go along after the men and clear up the everlasting muss they made? Well, we are still at the same task. Our politics are no more corrupt than our housekeeping would be if we let you run it alone."

"Generations of the past have been responsible for certain iniquitous practises, but it remained for the present century to shut the little ones up in factories, stunting physical and mental growth. Because of child labor today the future generation of men and women will suffer. Their career will bear the stamp of human brutality."

"If a woman with property needs the ballot, a woman who has nothing but her labor power needs two ballots."

"A woman's place is like a man's place. It is where her work is, wherever she can do the most good; wherever she serves herself best without invading anyone else."

"I would rather be a woman without a vote and yet know HOW to vote, than to be a man who HAS a vote and hasn't sense enough to use it."

"Remember that your brain is no more developed by the thoughts your husband thinks than your body is nourished by the food your husband eats."

"“So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth."

"“I am a man who believes nothing, hopes nothing, fears nothing, feels nothing. I am beyond the pale of humanity [...]”"

"“The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have and which they cannot take from us”"

"“There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.”"

"“I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man's foot; and I do not so greatly admire the crying of babies”"

"“If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?”"

"“I think,' said Lyndall, 'that he is like a thorn-tree, which grows up very quietly, without any one's caring for it, and one day suddenly breaks out into yellow blossoms.”"

"“The bees are very attentive to the flowers until their honey is done, and then they fly over them. I don't know if the flowers feel grateful to the bees, they are great fools if they do.”"

"“All things on earth have their price, and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your heart.”"

"“Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour.”"

"“[O]nly the sea is like a human being . . .always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting. It hurries on; and then it creeps back slowly without having reached, moaning. It is always asking a question and it never gets the answer.”"

""And she said, in a voice strangely unlike her own: “I see the vision of a poor, weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short, and in the end it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that”—She moved her white hand and laid it on her forehead—“happiness is a great love and much serving. It was not cut short; and it loved what it had learnt—it loved—and—”"

"“why am I so alone, so hard, so cold? I am so weary of myself! It is eating my soul to its core,--self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot breathe, I cannot live! Will nothing free me from myself?' She pressed her cheek agains the wooden post. 'I want to love! I want something great and pure to lift me to itself! Dear old man, I cannot bear it any more! I am so cold, so hard, so hard; will no one help me!”"

"What need had he of experience? Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour."

"And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable—all is meaning-full; nothing is small—all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, not too small. And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us, and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again."

"“When the curtain falls no one is ready”"

"It is delightful to be a woman; but every man thanks the Lord devoutly that he isn’t one."

"We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World."

"This dirty little world full of confusion, and the blue rag, stretched overhead for a sky, is so low we could touch it with our hand."

"Very tenderly the old man looked at him. He saw not the bloated body nor the evil face of the man; but, as it were, under deep disguise and fleshly concealment, the form that long years of dreaming had made very real to him."

"Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world."

"The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted ‘karroo’ bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long, finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.”"

"And you do not need to. When you are seventeen this Boer-woman will go; you will have this farm and everything that is upon it for your own; but I,’ said Lyndall, ‘will have nothing. I must learn.’”"

"Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it—but there is."

"“I have discovered that of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding-school is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate.”"

"When Olive Schreiner, aged seventeen, wrote the South African Farm, some among her friends were disappointed she had not called more upon her imagination and described wild and thrilling adventures, as her country might have suggested. "Such works," she says in her Preface to this wonderful book, "are best written in Piccadilly or the Strand; there the gifts of creative imagination, untrammelled by contact with fact, may spread their wings. Those brilliant phases and shapes are not for her to portray. Sadly she must squeeze the colour from her brush. She must paint what lies before her.""

"“On the path to truth, at every step, you set your foot down on your own heart.”"

"The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner is often thought of as being the beginning of South African literature. She stood more or less alone."

"“Why hate, and struggle, and fight? Let is be as it would.”"

"“For a little sould that cries oout aloud for continued personal existence for itseld and its beloved, there is no help. For the sould which know itself no more as a unit, but as part of the Universal Unit of which the Beloved also is part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is not death.”"

"“I have sought,” he said, “for long years I have laboured; but I have not found her. I have not rested, I have not repined, and I have not seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down worn out other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They will never know the name of the man who made them. At the clumsy work they will laugh; when the stones roll they will curse me. But they will mount, and on my work; they will climb, and by my stair! They will find her, and through me! And no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself.”"

"A developer has bought the central-city apartment building where Sandy, a single mother, has been living with her two children; he plans to convert it into condominiums. … She looks in the newspaper and online for apartment rental advertisements, and she is shocked at the rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments. … Sandy searches for two months, with the eviction deadline looming over her. Finally she settles for a one-bedroom apartment a forty-five-minute drive from her job. … Sandy sees no other option but to take the apartment, and then faces one final hurdle: she needs to deposit three months' rent to secure the apartment. She has used all her savings for a down payment on the car, however. So she cannot rent the apartment, and having learned that this is a typical landlord policy, she now faces the prospect of homelessness. This mundane story can be repeated with minor variations for hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. … She is largely a victim of circumstances beyond her control—the landlord’s decision to sell the apartment building, a sex-segregated labor market that makes low-wage service jobs the primary work opportunity for women without college or technical training, the "spatial mismatch" that locates those jobs far from most affordable housing, and so on. … Most people react to a situation like Sandy's with the intuition that something is wrong. But what is the wrong, and who is responsible for it? The wrong is structural injustice."

"Social movements for global democracy and justice should try not only to build on and create global legal and regulatory institutions, but also to expand possibilities for transnational association and public spheres."

"The work that she has done through the Self-Employed Women's Association is not only about finding solutions to the problems of poverty. At its most basic level, Ela's work is about fairness, about giving every person the chance to achieve his or her dreams, to make the most of his or her God-given potential'no matter how rich or poor, no matter whether they work in a factory or a home or on the side of a road."

"Even in places where it is most stark, people still should be able to develop their ambitions and direct them toward building better lives. And Ela and SEWA have proven that,"

"So for her contribution to India and particularly the women of India, and to the global community, it is my honour to present the first Global Fairness Award to my friend, Ela Bhatt""

"Ela Bhatt has upended the old ways of thinking and compelled all of us to raise our collective ambitions about what we can do to."