Activists From The United States

"They are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances, not because of it. Think of how the world can be a much better place if, for a change, we have a better equality, we have equality, we have a representation and we understand war, both from the front-line and the back-line discussion."

"There are two sides of war. There is a side that fights, and there is a side that keeps the schools and the factories and the hospitals open. There is a side that is focused on winning battles, and there is a side that is focused on winning life. There is a side that leads the front-line discussion, and there is a side that leads the back-line discussion. There is a side that thinks that peace is the end of fighting, and there is a side that thinks that peace is the arrival of schools and jobs. There is a side that is led by men, and there is a side that is led by women. And in order for us to understand how do we build lasting peace, we must understand war and peace from both sides. We must have a full picture of what that means."

"We are missing stories of women who are literally keeping life going in the midst of wars. Do you know -- do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life going? And the ones who are keeping that life are women."

"We have been so consumed with seemingly objective discussions of politics, tactics, weapons, dollars and casualties. This is the language of sterility."

"I have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same, but the fears of war are the same. You know, there is a fear of dying."

"Nonviolence begins with the insights that all life is sacred, that all human beings are children of the God of peace, and that as God’s children, we are under certain obligations. Of course, we should never hurt or kill another human being, wage war, build nuclear weapons, or sit idly by while millions of human beings starve to death each year. Nonviolence invites us, also, to reevaluate the way we treat animals in our society. While we resist violence, injustice, and war, and while we practice nonviolence, seek peace, and struggle for justice for the poor, we are also invited to break down the species barrier, extending our belief in Christian compassion to the animal kingdom by, among other things, adopting a vegetarian diet."

"Appreciation of Mother Earth, her creatures, and the glories of the universe is the job of every human being. We were created to live nonviolently in peace with one another on Mother Earth and celebrate the beauty of creation morning, noon, and night."

"Our appetite for meat leads to widespread, horrific cruelty to animals—chickens pressed wing-to-wing into filthy sheds and debeaked, for example. And since I've always espoused creative nonviolence as the fundamental gospel value, my vegetarianism helps me not to participate in the vicious torture and destruction of billions of cows, chickens, and so many other creatures. These chickens never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything natural. … Animals have feelings, they suffer; they have needs and desires. They were created by God to breathe fresh air, raise their families, peck in the grass, or root in the soil. Today's farms don't let them do anything God designed them to do. Animal scientists attest that farm animals have personalities and interests, that chickens and pigs can be smarter than dogs and cats. I like that even Jesus identified himself as “a mother hen who longs to gather us under her wings.”"

"The only diet for a peacemaker, for an environmentalist, is a vegetarian diet. … I became a vegetarian thirty-five years ago, after reading Frances Moore Lappé's book Diet for a Small Planet, which makes an unassailable case that vegetarianism is the best way to eliminate world hunger as well as to sustain the environment."

"I am convinced that society will look back on human arrogance and cruelty toward other animals with the same horror and disbelief that we presently reserve for atrocities committed against human beings."

"Many Christians who agree that harming a dog or cat is wrong think nothing of harming cows, pigs, chickens, fish and other creatures. We need to understand that if we’re eating meat, we are paying people to be cruel to animals. For the simple reasons that all animals are creatures beloved by God and that God created them with a capacity for pain and suffering, we should adopt a vegetarian diet."

"Vegetarianism proves that we’re serious about our belief in compassion and justice, that we’re mindful of our commitment, day in and day out, every time we eat. We are reminded of our belief in mercy, and we remind others. We begin to live the nonviolent vision, right here and now."

"The key to changing the world and pursuing justice and disarmament is to allow the God of peace to disarm our hearts, make us instruments of peace, and lead us together on the road of peace."

"You didn't lose a child to autism. You lost a child because the child you waited for never came into existence. That isn't the fault of the autistic child who does exist, and it shouldn't be our burden. We need and deserve families who can see us and value us for ourselves, not families whose vision of us is obscured by the ghosts of children who never lived. Grieve if you must, for your own lost dreams. But don't mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we're here waiting for you."

"When parents say,"

"If you understand life, you know that it wants to continue. If you feel life throbbing under your touch, you know it’s desecration to set your hand to stop that living pulse. If you love something, you don’t kill it."

"There is no inherent conflict between accepting and working with autism on one hand, and promoting increased skill development on the other. It is the role of all teachers, counselors, and therapists to promote growth and learning. For professionals working with autistic people, the important issue is that autistic people should be assisted in growing and developing into more capable autistic people, not pushed to become like non-autistic people."

"Well, I know for a fact that there are at least some parents who are not unhappy and miserable about having autistic children, and do not want their children cured--though they'll move mountains to get appropriate education and support programs for their children. I have yet to hear of even one parent of a child with cystic fibrosis or cancer who would be content to have a dead child, just as long as the child got good educational and support services."

"Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: Itself. It becomes everyone’s intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power."

"Television is an experience that can be had by virtually everyone at the same time. By substituting for a greater diversity of experiences and unifying everyone with it, it aids commercial efficiency. With all people confined to the same mental and physical condition, a single advertising or political voice appropriate to the common mood can influence everyone."

"Psychiatrist R. D. Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real, but only in the way that a theatrical play or a fun house is real. Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans. It is an interpretation of reality; it no longer reveals how nature works and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process. We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation."

"Imamu Amiri Baraka, a seminal man of letters, a revolutionary black nationalist, and a mesmerizing poet."

"LeRoi Jones was also one of the popular poets of the 1968 generation. His most famous line was fast becoming “Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick-up.” A 1967 East Village “affinity group” named themselves “the Motherfuckers” after the Jones poem. An affinity group used intense intellectual debates as an underpinning for carrying out the kind of media-grabbing street theater that Abbie Hoffman could do so well. During the New York City garbage strike, the Motherfuckers hauled garbage by subway from the redolent mountains of it left on the sidewalks to the newly opened Lincoln Center."

"Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka and other black male leaders have righteously supported patriarchy. They have all argued that it is absolutely necessary for black men to relegate black women to a subordinate position both in the political sphere and in home life."

"I think Amiri Baraka’s work made me want to write poems too. Especially his beautiful poem, “An Agony. As Now.” A really, really beautiful poem."

"(At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things."

"I remember the first time I met Amiri Baraka, who was then Leroi Jones. I was doing The Amen Corner and he was a student at Howard University. I liked him right away. He was a pop-eyed little boy poet. He showed me a couple of his poems. I liked them very much. And then he came to New York a couple of years later. He came to New York when I came back to New York from Paris. And by this time I knew the business. I'd been through the fucking business by that time. I was a survivor. And I remember telling him that his agent wanted him to become the young James Baldwin. But I told him you're not the young James Baldwin. There's only one James Baldwin and you are Leroi Jones and there's only one Leroi Jones. Don't let them run this game on us, you know? You're. Leroi Jones, I'm James Baldwin. And we're going to need each other. That's all I said. He didn't believe it then but time took care of that. ("He believes it now?") Yes he knows it now."

"("In the early 70s, Amiri Baraka wrote such things as the woman's role was to be feminine and submissive. How far do you think black male attitudes have changed since then, since the Black Panther movement?") MA: That was an aberration which took place and black women for a while said: 'Okay, we'll see what you do with this,' and it didn't happen. Black women said: 'No babe we don't take it like that,' and we don't, we haven't. We were sold together, bought together on the African continent, lay spoon fashion in the filthy hatchets of slave ships together, got up on the auction block together, stood together, sold again together, got up before sunrise, got up after sunset, together, worked those cane fields and cotton fields and the mines and all that together. Please, we are equal."

"A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom."

"So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat. But I didn't want an Arab name ... [so] I took the name and Swahili-ized it and Bantu-ized it, and changed it from Amir to Amiri and from Barakat to Baraka to make it a Swahili name — the same kind of name you'd find in Tanzania or Uganda or Kenya. Now, of course I'm no longer in a cultural nationalist movement, but I'd be the only one in my family with an American name."

"I guess I was the most unbohemian of all bohemians. My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with — ... namely America..."

"When I was saying, 'White people go to hell,' I never had trouble finding a publisher, but when I was saying, 'Black and white, unite and fight, destroy capitalism,' then you suddenly get to be unreasonable."

"You cannot stop struggling just because you’ve got a black guy walking around saying some stuff. Just because his skin is your color don’t mean his brain is the same as yours; if you’re going to bomb Libya you’re nuts. So it’s a continual struggle to raise the level of social consciousness in the country. Not only for black people but for everybody who needs that change."

"Art in an abstract setting is one thing, but art where you’re actually telling people to do things becomes dangerous…"

"One of the most persistent traits of the Western white man has always been his fanatical and almost instinctive assumption that his systems and ideas about the world are the most desirable, and further that people who do not aspire to to them, or at least think them admirable, are savages or enemies. The idea that Western thought might be exotic if viewed from another landscape never presents itself to most Westerners."

"It was because of my faith and my pro-life conviction, but ultimately, it was because of my kids, I want to not just talk about my faith, but I want to live it out too. And a few years ago, some of the older ones [were] aware of Planned Parenthood and what occurs there, and so, I wanted to set the example for them and be a dad that they could be proud of,"

"With each new child, your ability to love grows. It’s not a matter of dividing your love among more children, so that each one gets less of it, but you actually have more to give with each new delivery. Children help you to stop thinking of yourself and expand your horizons. This is a joyful challenge. It’s more difficult than football or any other job, but also more rewarding."

"The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of the society, and of himself, in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering, and if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness, and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil."

"The poor Negro always remembered himself as an ex-slave and used this as the basis of any dealings with the mainstream of American society. The middle class black man bases his whole existence on the hopeless hypothesis that no one is supposed to remember that for almost three hundred years there was slavery in America, that the white man was a master, the black man a slave. This knowledge, however, is at the root of the legitimate black culture of this country. It is this knowledge, with its attendant muses of self-division, self-hatred, stoicism, and finally quixotic optimism, that informs the most meaningful of Afro-American music."

"Robert Parish and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are the two reasons I became a vegetarian fully in the first place. They where the first ones I saw and I was 27 at the time and there was an article about Robert Parish and one of his martial art forms and I remember playing against this guy and asking him how he was running up and down the court with me and I was in my twenties. He said, "you have to learn to pace yourself young fella". … Then I would go, "well then your car has no gas" and I thought about that. So at 27 I made the change. … I had a good career but Robert Parish had a view to look at stats and a better career. If I would have known how to take care of my body … then I would have played until I was 40 as well."

"I credit my plant-based diet with giving me the energy and stamina to help carry my teams to four NBA championship wins. … Veganism has become a transformative part of my life and I have made it my mission to share the power of plant-based eating with the world. … Vegan eating is not just a slam dunk for human health; it’s also the most effective way to combat climate change, according to a 2010 report by the United Nations. … going vegan is one of the best things a person can do for their health, for animals, and for the environment."

"Italian language is not just sonore. It is also visual."

"Insolera’s efforts are equal to that of any Marvel star."

"Emilio Insolera’s “Sign Gene” gave the world its first deaf superheroes. But after writing, directing, producing and starring in the film himself, you might argue that Insolera is the one with the superpowers."

"The greatest merit of Sign Gene is to break the veil that separates the audiences from the mysterious and fascinating world of the deaf, just as it did at the party in the Odeon auditorium, all united from that silent toast, from that speaking animatedly without voice, from that mimic joy in which we – incapable of communicating – were the only outsiders, the unique dis/ables, mutes like fishes in a very capable and alien society. Yes, if wanted to subvert, Insolera made the centerpiece."

"Sign Gene's director (Emilio Insolera) met up with Tokyo Journal in Shibuya whilst en route to the NHK studios. The director turns out to be a lively character, one, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a sense for physical and situational humor."

"You can see the existence of these beautiful signed languages which are incredibly visual, and they require space, they require space to grow."

"I’ve often felt visual communicators have superhero-like qualities."

"“My first impression was that I had stumbled into the future, but as a linguist I was also instantly fascinated with Japanese and how it has a relationship with sign language. Kanji are usually concepts or ideas and then hiragana acts as a bridge for communication It’s the same with sign language: We use fingerspelling (spelling out the alphabet with your hands) between our conceptual signs."

"From the director to the international cast, all of them are from deaf families for generations, while the film industry usually entrusts these roles to audacious interpreters that end up being bad imitators of the Sign language."