Activists From Canada

"..we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves. So that, then we go down, what is it that is despicable in ourselves? And there are some elements despicable in ourselves, which we don't want to look at, but which are part of our natures, that we are mortal."

"We are very fragile in front of the future. Accidents and sicknesses is the reality. We are born in extreme weakness and our life will end in extreme weakness. So this, people don't want to hold on to that. They want to prove something. They want security. They want to have big bank accounts and all that sort of stuff. But then also, hold lots of fears within us."

"I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes."

"To look forward, to want life, means we have to be willing to look backwards and become more conscious of all those who have hurt us, all that is broken in us and that has brought us inner deaths, hurts that we may have hidden and stifled. It means that we acknowledge the story of our origins, of our own lives, see and accept our brokenness and the times we also have hurt others. When we have accepted who we are and what we need in order to grow in compassion and peacemaking, we can move forward to give life. To forgive is a gift of God that permits us to let go of our past hurts."

"Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don't talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live."

"Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: "He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community." A community is not an abstract ideal. We are not striving for perfect community. Community is not an ideal; it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we would want them to be. Community means giving them space, helping them to grow. It means also receiving from them so that we too can grow. It is giving each other freedom; it is giving each other trust; it is confirming but also challenging each other. We give dignity to each other by the way we listen to each other, in a spirit of trust and of dying to oneself so that the other may live, grow and give."

"Those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us. When we do include them, they add richly to our lives and add immensely to our world."

"“To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.”"

"Peace can only come as people begin to meet each other. Those that do have the courage to cross the road, however, to look kindly at people and to listen to them with tenderness, will find people much like themselves, people seeking to be loved for who they are. And that it is OK for each one of us to admit, "I don't have all the truth. ... I am vulnerable, I am broken. I need help." Then comes the realization, "I need your help. I need your friendship." In the end, what you will find, and what you will help the world to discover, Vanier said, is what it means to be human."

"Love is to recognize that the other person is a person, is precious, is important and has value..Each one has a gift to bring to others. Each one has his or her mission in the larger family of humanity. Each one reveals the secret face of God."

"Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness."

"Somewhere, the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value. But not just seen — and Aristotle makes a difference between being admired and being loved. When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together. So really, the first meeting I had with people with disabilities, what touched me was their cry for relationship."

"Try and find somebody who is lonely. And when you go to see them, they will see you as the messiah. Go and visit a little old lady who has no friends or family. Bring her flowers. People say ‘but that’s nothing.’ It is nothing—but it’s also everything. It always begins with small little things. It all began in Bethlehem. That was pretty small."

"The great thing about people with intellectual disabilities is that they’re not people who discuss philosophy... What they want is fun and laughter, to do things together and fool around, and laughter is at the heart of community."

"There is that little compass within each one of us where we know what is right, what is just, what is good, what is true."

"What people with disabilities want is to relate. This is something unique. It makes people who are closed up in the head become human. The wonderful thing about people with disabilities is that when someone important comes, they don’t care. They care about the relationship. So they have a healing power, a healing power of love."

"The suffering inflicted by this present order invariably produces a struggle to overcome it."

"At its heart, this book is about where this new left has come from, and where it might be going."

"When history moves — really moves — it does so in great convulsive jolts."

"To make history — to change the actual course of world events — is intoxicating, inspiring, and life-transforming."

"Corporate globalization and the economic agreements designed to entrench it have little to do with trade — and all but the most ignorant neo-liberal pundits surely know this too."

""Free trade" is a slogan used to attack practices designed by competitor economies to protect their own interests."

""Free trade" is a policy imposed on the weakest and evaded by the most powerful."

"Under , in other words, the right of corporations to bring thousands of tons of hazardous waste into local communities overrides the right of residents to protect their health."

"Put baldly, globalization has been nothing less than a mechanism for a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich — in other words, exactly what it is was designed to be."

"Behind their fluffy rhetoric about free trade and free markets lurks a hostility toward freedom for ordinary people — and a love affair with police and prisons."

"Contrary to liberal myth, Smith was not an apologist for capitalists. He argued in fact, that capitalists always seek "to deceive and oppress the public" by conspiring to inflate their prices and profits."

"The neoliberal utopia of unrestrained capitalism is being created by a war against the poor and the commons. In fact, the "new enclosures" are a sign that the struggles that marked the birth of capitalism are still very much alive."

"Common wealth is in the process of being transferred from the public domain to the private sector."

"Globalization is thus also about global commodification of labour; it is about — global proletarianization — the creation of a world working class for capital to exploit."

"In short, the rules of behaviour in capitalist society systematically produce irrational consequences."

"What was it, then, about the development of capitalism that gave rise to modern racial ideology?"

"The fundamental truth about globalization — that it represents freedom for capital and unfreedom for labour — is especially clear where global migrants are concerned."

"The Greek philosopher Plato may have rejected the idea that "might makes right" some 2,500 years ago, but America and its allies today make it the cornerstone of foreign policy."

"In many respects, the Second World War was a continuation of the First, a conflict triggered by the mismatch between industrial power and imperial reach."

"Once capitalist classes learn to live with unions — which they generally do reluctantly, only after efforts to crush them have failed — they then attempt to co-opt organized labour. They do so by courting a "special relationship" with union leaders who, as their organizations become larger and more complex, typically assume the role of full time union functionaries."

"Genuine growth is always dialogical — it requires engagement in a dynamic, developing, and open-ended dialogue."

"A society that has moved beyond commodification is one that has embraced the most thoroughgoing radical democracy in all spheres of social life."

"Social movements will not develop if they refuse to name and define alternative possibilities."

"Here at Adbusters, we decided to tackle the issue head on and came up with a carefully researched list of who appear to be the 50 most influential neocons in the US (see above). Deciding who exactly is a neocon is difficult since some neocons reject the term while others embrace it. Some shape policy from within the White House, while others are more peripheral, exacting influence indirectly as journalists, academics and think tank policy wonks. What they all share is the view that the US is a benevolent hyper power that must protect itself by reshaping the rest of the world into its morally superior image. And half of them are Jewish."

"We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped."

"[J]amming a coin into a monopoly newspaper box or liberating a billboard in the middle of the night can be a rather honest and joyful thing to do."

"[Culture] Jammers are now mobilizing to repeat the tobacco story in many other areas of life. We’re going to take on the global automakers, the chemical companies, the food industries, the fashion corporations and the pop-culture marketers in a free-information environment …We want auto executives to feel just as squeezed and beleaguered as tobacco executives. We want them to have a hard time looking their kids in the eye and explaining exactly what they do for a living."

"Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for nonsmoking areas ten years ago."

"America, the great liberator, is in desperate need of being liberated from itself -- from its own excesses and arrogance. And the world needs to be liberated from American values and culture, spreading across the planet as if by divine providence."

"Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment."

"I don't eat fish because there is no such thing as sustainable fishing in the world right now."

"The oceans are dying."

"We have intelligent species on our planet that we are not even trying to communicate with."

"We cannot allow activism to be stifled because of all the paranoia going around."