Feminists

"It wasn't until I saw the comments that I realised some people reacted aggressively towards my performance. It kind of scared me. I felt like I was dragged into a war I didn't start. I'm only trying to be funny. In fact, in the same performance, I also ridiculed women for being emotional, but I didn't receive any hateful comments or threats from female netizens. Women have most likely become used to their stereotypical weakness being made fun of, while men have heard so few jokes like this before."

"Regarding the change in identity, I actually took the initiative to accept and work hard to change in this direction, because I feel that growing up on the stage is not as rewarding as recording a show, and I am still eager to go."

"My mother never urged me to have a blind date again. She felt that if a man wanted to marry me, it might just be more convenient for him to beat me. In this world, all girls will get sympathy when they encounter domestic violence."

"To be honest, I thought at first that it was an advantage for women to stand alone, because the most important thing for actors is to have their own labels on stage, and actresses carry their own labels. My image on stage has always been that of a girl who is single, who wants to fall in love and who is not particular about being particular."

"If a man wants to marry me now, it should be more convenient when he just wants to beat me."

"The supermodels all have skeletal bodies . . . the very existence of their bodies expresses an attitude: the disdain for men. The more men like a certain part of their bodies, the less they want to grow that part. Fashion is such an attitude."

"Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay. Laundry is strung outside the house. The water comes from a well in a yard, overgrown with weeds. Only two police officers and Manuela, a three-legged dog, keep watch outside. This is the residence of the president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, whose lifestyle clearly differs sharply from that of most other world leaders. President Mujica has shunned the luxurious house that the Uruguayan state provides for its leaders and opted to stay at his wife's farmhouse, off a dirt road outside the capital, Montevideo. The president and his wife work the land themselves, growing flowers. This austere lifestyle - and the fact that Mujica donates about 90% of his monthly salary, equivalent to $12,000 (£7,500), to charity - has led him to be labelled the poorest president in the world... Elected in 2009, Mujica spent the 1960s and 1970s as part of the Uruguayan guerrilla Tupamaros, a leftist armed group inspired by the Cuban revolution. He was shot six times and spent 14 years in jail. Most of his detention was spent in harsh conditions and isolation, until he was freed in 1985 when Uruguay returned to democracy. Those years in jail, Mujica says, helped shape his outlook on life....Uruguayan law means he is not allowed to seek re-election in 2014. Also, at 77, he is likely to retire from politics altogether before long."

"As men, you stand at the center of the universe. You spout pearls of wisdom that shape the future of the world. So when your female friend comes to you, you might wonder: ‘Is she hoping to share her sadness with me? No, she must be hoping to learn something from me!’"

"Intel is so picky about laptops, they’re even more selective than my taste in men."

"A joke can only get laughs for one reason because it resonates."

"Unlike women, who always think of themselves as unimportant, men always think of themselves as the center of the universe. Every single sentence from men carries utmost importance, and points out the right direction in which the world should advance."

"Men are adorable, but mysterious...How can he be so average, yet so full of confidence?"

"Pepe Mujica, former president of Uruguay who enjoys almost universal admiration in Latin America, said: “Anyone who looks at a map to say that Venezuela could be a threat has to be quite mad. Venezuelans have a marvelous Constitution – the most audacious in all of Latin America.” [xi]"

"To see him today, now aged 78, sitting on his wooden chair, surrounded by books and silence, a pair of sandals on his feet and a bust of Che Guevara opposite him, you might take Mujica for some Latino Diogenes, a benevolent patriarch, the last man on Earth and obviously indignant. He is also one of the few people to have experienced nothingness, spending two years' captivity at the bottom of a well... The international media have described him as "the most incredible politician" or indeed "the best leader in the world". Some have suggested he should win the next Nobel peace prize. He is also thought to be the world's poorest president, because he gives almost 90% of his income to low-income housing organisations. He is not very keen on such labels. The pinnacle of his presidential career came in June 2012 when defence minister Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro announced that the state would be taking over the production and sale of marijuana, which would be legalised and regulated... Mujica, who says he has never smoked a joint and knows very well that 62% of voters are opposed to legalisation, yet has no qualms about launching the world's first state-grown marijuana. He says it is a question of public security and that he is determined to separate consumers from dealers, and marijuana from other narcotics... He may indeed be a bit crazy, but he is also captivating and quite unique among world leaders."

"Jose Mujica, a former leader of the Marxist Tupamaros guerrilla group, left behind a progressive model of governance, characterized by frugality, simplicity and focused leadership. With a moral and ethical underpinning that emphasizes love, concern and sacrifice, his model of leadership is a telling lesson to a world run by cabals and institutions whose sole idea of development revolves around exploitative and lopsided power relations... In November 2009, at 74, Pepe, as he is fondly called, was elected president, having polled 53 per cent of the vote. The result is a new, improved Uruguay, economically strong, politically stable, socially bonded and with a reduced crime rate. Mujica... demonstrates a genuine spirit of selflessness and concern for his people... The 79-year old Mujica, who as president, lived with his wife in his rustic farm settlement in the country-side and drove to work in his weather-beaten 1987 Volkswagen Beetle, has been renowned for other eccentricities: even while in office, he grew flowers, enjoyed the bucolic wild, and continually soaked his intellect in classical philosophy texts from Plato, Seneca to Marx and Segundo. While he sees himself as a ‘humble peasant’, he has been variously described as ‘the most incredible politician’, ‘best leader in the world’, and even ‘the world’s poorest president’."

"As such, the hard-working diva, through her three-year-old Vabvana Trust, has since stepped up efforts to bring smiles on the poor"

"Selmor has been exceptionally helpful as we build up the new Old Mutual Amazing Voices talent search initiative, designed to platform a whole new generation of singers, so her role in working with the aspiring competitors has been enormously beneficial."

"I just want to walk my path but I don’t mind having him around me."

"So I salute the efforts and agreements being made. And I will adhere to them, as a ruler. I know some things I’m saying are not easy to digest. But we must realize that the water crisis and the aggression to the environment is not the cause. The cause is the model of civilization that we have created. And the thing we have to re-examine is our way of life."

"Our biological duty is, above all, to respect life, promote it, take care of it, reproduce it and understand that WE are the species."

"Consider that human life is a miracle, that we are alive as a result of a miracle, and that nothing is more important than life."

"Let us consider the deep-rooted causes, the civilization of waste, the present civilization that is stealing time from human life and wasting it on pointless matters."

"If our dreams are to come true, we will have to control ourselves or we will die. We will die because we are not capable of being at the level of the civilization that we have been developing with our efforts. That is our dilemma. We should not spend our time merely correcting the consequences."

"It is possible to eliminate poverty from the planet. It is possible to create stability. It will be possible for future generations, if they begin to reason as a species and not just as individuals..."

"If the power of humankind is focused on what is essential, it is infinite."

"With talent and collective work, with science, step by step humankind can make deserts green; humankind can bring agriculture to the seas; humankind can develop agriculture that lives with salt water."

"What is the big picture of which we speak? It is the system of global life on Earth, including human life, with all the fragile balances that make it impossible for us to continue as we are."

"The greed that pushed us to domesticate science and transform technology — is paradoxically pushing us over the edge into a shadowy abyss, towards an unknown fate, an era without history, and we are left without eyes to see or the collective intelligence to continue to colonize and transform ourselves."

"How many millions of dollars have they taken from our pockets deliberately creating junk so that people will buy and buy and buy?...In our culture, we act as if nothing had happened. Instead of us controlling globalization, it controls us."

"Turning to a useful neo-Keynesianism on a global scale in order to abolish the world’s most flagrant embarrassments would be a thousand times more profitable than making war."

"We must achieve a broad planetary consensus to unleash solidarity among the most oppressed and to punish and tax waste and speculation by mobilizing the large economies not to produce disposable goods, but rather useful goods without planned obsolescence or excess, which would help the world’s poorest peoples. Useful goods could stand against world poverty."

"Today, the world is incapable of establishing global regulations for the planet, due to the failure of lofty global politics, which meddles with everything."

"Medical research on all manner of diseases, which has made huge advances and is a blessing that promises longer life, receives barely a fifth of what is budgeted for the military. That process, from which we cannot escape, perpetuates hatred, fanaticism and distrust, fuels new wars and wastes fortunes."

"Every minute in the life of our planet, we spend $2 million on military budgets around the world — $2 million a minute."

"The fact is that we tend to cultivate feudal anachronisms, spoiled affectations and hierarchical distinctions that undermine the best feature of republics — the fact that no one is better than anyone else. The interaction of those factors and others keeps us living in prehistory, and today it is impossible to renounce war when politics fails. Thus, economies are strangled and resources wasted."

"We have finally learned that intelligence must be at the helm, guiding the ship to port."

"We have to figure out how to recycle more and how to counter global warming. What are the limits of each human task? How many years ago did they tell us in Kyoto about certain facts linked to climate change?"

"The world is clamoring for global regulations that respect scientific achievements, which abound, but it is not science that governs the world."

"Truly productive capitalism is a prisoner of the banks, which are at the summit of global power."

"The globalized economy has no other driving force except that of the private interests of the very few, and each nation State seeks only to maintain its own stability."

"Today, it is time to fight to prepare a world without borders."

"The average city dweller wanders between financial institutions and tedious office routines, sometimes moderated by air conditioning. He often dreams about vacations and freedom. He dreams about having the ability to pay his bills until one day his heart stops and he is gone. Other such soldiers will fall prey to the jaws of the marketplace."

"Going from one adventure to another, politics achieves little more than perpetuating itself, and as such it delegates its power and spends its time bewildered, fighting for the Government. Out of control, human history marches forward, buying and selling everything and innovating in order to negotiate what is, in a way, non-negotiable..."

"Politics, the eternal mother of all human endeavors, has remained shackled to the economy and to the marketplace."

"Stupefied, we have rejected our own biological imperative, which defends life for life’s sake as a superior cause, and we have replaced it by functional consumerism and accumulation."

"Our civilization has mounted a deceitful challenge, and as we go on it is not possible for everyone to achieve that goal. Indeed, our culture is increasingly driven by accumulation and market forces. We are promised a life of spending and squandering; in fact, it is a countdown against nature and against future humankind. It is a civilization against simplicity, against sobriety, against all natural cycles; It is a civilization against freedom, which requires time to experience human relationships and the most important things: love, friendship, adventure, solidarity and family"

"It is true that today, in order to spend and to bury our garbage in what science calls the carbon footprint, if in this world we aspired to consume like the average American, we would need three planets in order to be able to live."

"It seems that we have been born, only to consume. And when we can no longer consume, we have a feeling of frustration, we suffer from poverty and we are marginalized...."

"We have sacrificed the old immaterial Gods and now we are occupying the temple of the market god. This god organizes our economy, our politics, our habits, our lives and even provides us with rates and credit cards and gives us the appearance of happiness."

"The fight against the dirty economy, drug trafficking, theft & fraud, corruption - all of these contemporary scourges which were adopted by this opposite set of values, those who maintain that we are happier when we are richer no matter what means are used."