Critical Resistance Quotes & Sayings

The Internet is a wonder, to be sure, but it is also a curse. Part of the problem with the Internet is that it has taught generations of people to look for what they believe to be true, for confirmation of their assumption. That is never a good practice. No matter how square the fact is, if it is soft enough, it can be jammed into a round hole. The Internet is full of very squishy facts. — Sheila Horgan

The inner is foundation of the outer
The still is master of the restless
The Sage travels all day
yet never leaves his inner treasure — Lao-Tzu

I think the invitation offered the non-black reader is to join us in this expression of our familiarity and via that joining, come to understand that when black people come together to celebrate and rejoice in black critical thinking, we do so not to exclude or to separate, but to participate more fully in world community. However, we must first be able to dialogue with one another, to give one another subject-to-subject recognition that is an act of resistance that is part of the decolonizing, anti-racist process. — Bell Hooks

I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can't read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance. — Bell Hooks

We know what we are, but not what we may be. — William Shakespeare

It's both a tremendous obligation and honor to undertake the unfulfilled work of the best of our abolitionist precursors--those who did not only want the abolition of white supremacist slavery and normalized anti-Black violence, but who also recognized that the greatest promise of abolitionism was a comprehensive transformation of a civilization in which the sanctity of white civil society was defined by its capacity to define 'community' and 'safety' through the effective of its ability to wage racial genocides. The present day work of (..) abolition has to proceed with organic recognition of its historical roots in liberation struggles against slavery, colonization, and conquest--and therefore struggle to constantly develop effective, creative, and politically educating forms of radical movement against the genocidal white supremacist state and the society to which it's tethered. — Dylan Rodriguez

As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker. — Gustave Flaubert

Despite long-standing claims by elites that Blacks, women, Latinos, and other similarly derogated groups in the United States remain incapable of producing the type of interpretive, analytical thought that is labeled theory in the West, powerful knowledges of resistance that toppled former social structures of social inequality repudiate this view. Members of these groups do in fact theorize, and our critical social theory has been central to our political empowerment and search for justice. — Patricia Hill Collins

Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974. — Jose Saramago

For the next several years, they gathered critical intelligence on German troop movements, blew up fuel depots, stole Nazi uniforms, and sabotaged lorries. Once, Avi and Jacob were ordered to attack a police station and grab any uniforms they could. They captured two police uniforms, two pistols, a small box of ammunition, and a money box with over ten thousand francs inside. What's more, they escaped with a bonus neither of them had expected - a stash of six thousand food-ration coupons, which they promptly gave to Morry to distribute among the various Jewish Resistance members scattered throughout the country. — Joel C. Rosenberg

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For your next act, please don't pull any rabbits out of my ... well, hat."
...
He licked playfully at her mouth. "And ya can't call my manhood 'rabbit'. — Michelle M. Pillow

Complexity theory shows that great changes can emerge
from small actions. Change involves a belief in the possible, even the "impossible."
Moreover, social innovators don't follow a
linear pathway of change; there are ups and
downs, roller-coaster rides along cascades
of dynamic interactions, unexpected and
unanticipated divergences, tipping points
and critical mass momentum shifts. Indeed,
things often get worse before they get better
as systems change creates resistance to and
pushback against the new.
Traditional evaluation approaches — Michael Quinn Patton

QUALITY leadership is neither the product of one great individual nor the result of odd historical accidents. Rather, it comes from deeply bred traditions and communities that shape and mold talented and gifted persons. Without a vibrant tradition of resistance passed on to new generations, there can be no nurturing of a collective and critical consciousness - only professional conscientiousness survives. — Cornel West

...we are partisan in favor of our own children and grandchildren, who we hope can live in a world that doesn't poison them when they drink the water, breathe the air, or make a living. — Bill Bigelow

No amount of logic can usually move a battered woman, so persuasion requires emotional leverage, not statistics or moral arguments ... I have seen their fear and resistance firsthand ... I believe it is critical for a woman to view staying as a choice, for only then can leaving be viewed as a choice and an option. — Gavin De Becker

I heard a horrible, stomach-turning crack that vibrated up my arms. Ari and I stared at each other in shock. "You really hurt me," he gasped rawly, terrible surprise in his voice. "I wouldn't hurt you. Not like this." Then his head flopped down, and Ari went totally limp. His — James Patterson

Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic-minded and critically engaged citizens - citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance. — Henry Giroux

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language. — John Donne

True resistance begins with people confronting pain ... and wanting to do something to change it. — Bell Hooks

So you were talking crap about me? Hm. I missed it. I was too busy being fabulous. — Dan Pearce

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal. — S. Ansky

Behind his careful political flippancy and cynicism one might also detect a certain careless sincerity, which would probably in the long run save him from moderate success, and turn him into one of the brilliant failures of his day. — Saki

I don't want you to leave without me. A wife belongs with her husband, and he belongs with her. I'm always selfish with you, asking you to move here, asking you to wait until it's good for my career before you leave, but there it is. — Christina Lauren

There is a 'patrician arrogance' to James Taylor that accounts in part for his popularity while it at the same time explains the critical resistance to his work. — Jon Landau

The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude. — Sigmund Freud

Even the stout of heart shrink when they see the approach of death. — Sophocles