Sunday, February 23, 2020 – The Resistance
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. ~ Robert Kennedy
The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance. ~ Thomas Paine
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it. ~ Woodrow Wilson
Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too. ~ Ulrike Marie Meinhof
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. ~ Philip K. Dick
Most of us have two lives: the life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. ~ Steven Pressfield
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil. ~ John Ruskin
Power is never so overwhelming that there’s no room for resistance. ~ Henry Giroux
I don’t believe in anarchy, because it will ultimately amount to the power of the bully, with weapons. Gandhi is my life’s inspiration: passive resistance. I don’t want to live in the Thunderdome with Mad Max. ~ John Lydon
I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism, just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler. ~ Paul Robeson
It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree. ~ James Weldon Johnson
We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
Europeans know the importance of the Resistance; it has been the shining example of the modern conscience. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo
People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave. ~ Assata Shakur
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. ~ Susan Sontag
I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. ~ Susan B. Anthony
Marxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It’s been hard to say why. What I’ve learned from women’s experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival. They produce self-loathing to the point of extinction of self, and it is respect for self that makes resistance conceivable. ~ Catharine A. MacKinnon
At fifteen, life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice. ~ Maya Angelou
If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again. ~ Malcolm X
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history, and as a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all. ~ Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death
You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone. ~ Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. ~ Carl Jung
Whenever you see a board up with “Trespassers will be prosecuted,” trespass at once. ~ Virginia Woolf
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. ~ Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
The system loves resistance. Resistance is often creative and it feeds on creativity until the subversive becomes just another pre-packaged lifestyle on special offer. So Cease to Resist. Relax and enjoy the Pandemonium. Believe everything and anything. Seek not proof, but take pleasure in your choice of belief. Wipe that superior sneer of your face and try smiling (if only inwardly) at the people/institutions/beliefs that you’ve waged your personal war against. Wouldn’t it be more fun if you didn’t run around quite so hard trying to be an individual, or fighting to prove or uphold your chosen belief-system? ~ Phil Hine
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless, the awakening of resistance. Life may grow from it as from a seed. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras
The car bomb is the poor man’s air force. ~ Mike Davis
There is a heady sense of manhood that comes from advancing from apathy to commitment, from timidity to courage, from passivity to aggressiveness. There is an intoxication that comes from standing up to the police at last. ~ David Dellinger
To a coward, courage always looks like stupidity. ~ Bill Maher
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. ~ Howard Zinn
After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means. ~ Mason Cooley
To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. ~ Sun Tzu
Resistance at all cost is the most senseless act there is. ~ Friedrich Durrenmatt
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be. ~ Christopher Hitchens
True politics is simply the drying of tears and the endless fight for freedom. Without freedom there is no art and no truth. I revere great artists and the men who say no to tyrants. ~ Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
Reading, after all, is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage. ~ David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time
Just Above Sunset 