Radical Act Quotes & Sayings

Thinking for yourself is still a radical act — Nancy Kline

Precisely because God does not determine himself in creation - because there is no dialectical necessity binding him to time or chaos, no need to forge his identity in the fires of history - in creating he reveals himself truly. Thus every evil that time comprises, natural or moral - a worthless distinction, really, since human nature is a natural phenomenon - is an arraignment of God's goodness: every death of a child, every chance calamity, every act of malice; everything diseased, thwarted, pitiless, purposeless, or cruel; and, until the end of all things, no answer has been given.

Precisely because creation is not a theogony, all of it is theophany.

(from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015):1-17) — David Bentley Hart

Tangerine tango was still in. Cardigans without buttons were in. Bahia bands were in. Senhor do Bonfim. Make a wish? But hardly anyone considered the most radical move: be yourself. Beauty is always a revolutionary act. — Chris Campanioni

Even though i'd admittedly accepted every advance he made on me, picking up my hand and putting it on his thigh seemed mighty forward of him. I didn't take the radical step of removing my hand,but I did open my mouth to act all indignant.
He put two fingers to my lips to stop me from talking.He knew me pretty well. His mouth close to my ear,he growled, "You know,you and I are exes."
"So?" I asked around his fingers.My skin tingled with excitement,or possibly eucalyptus poisoning. — Jennifer Echols

Someday someone is going to create a stir by proposing a radical new tool for the study people. It will be called the face-value technique. It would be based on the premise that people often do what they do for the reasons they think they do. The use of this technique will lead to many pitfalls, for it is undeniably true that people do not always act logically or say what they mean. But I wonder if it would produce findings any more unscientific than the opposite course. — William H. Whyte

Love is an act of art ... It is this creative quality of love, that it seeks to reshape the world for its sake and to create happiness, which makes love radical and potentially seditious ... the inverse is also true: art is an act of love. — Rod Dubey

Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "doing something"; academics participate in meaningless "debates," etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even "critical" participation or a critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a "dialogue" ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The "Bartlebian act" I propose is violent precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity-in it, violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), likewise activity and inactivity (the most radical thing is to do nothing). — Slavoj Zizek

I don't believe in marriage. I think at worst it's a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it's a happy delusion - these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they're about to make each other. But, but, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don't think it's conservative or delusional. I think it's radical and courageous and very romantic. — Tina Modotti

Let us banish fear. We have been in this mental state for three centuries. I am a radical. I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me. — Carter G. Woodson

Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called "radical" or "progressive" people don't hear enough "buzz" words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings). — Krysta Williams

There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret record. — Carroll Quigley

What if one of the core elements of a radical Christianity lay in a demand that we betray it, while the ultimate act of affirming God required the forsaking of God? And what if fidelity to the Judeo-Christian scriptures demanded their renunciation? In short, what if the only way of finding faith involved betraying it with a kiss? — Peter Rollins

The reality of our connection is a new story for the whole of civilization, and operating from the wisdom of relatedness is a radical act. It is the stuff of peaceful revolution and lasting transformation. — Heather Lyn Mann

All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman. — Catharine MacKinnon

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked. — Stacey D'Erasmo

But my bill, the Drill Now Act, would actually expedite the whole process, let the Interior Department move ahead quicker ... it would stop the radical environmental lawyers from delaying for years with frivolous lawsuits the leasing of the property. — Jim DeMint

The Cross is the approbation of our existence, not in words, but in an act so completely radical that it caused God to become flesh and pierced this flesh to the quick; that, to God, it was worth the death of his incarnate Son. — Pope Benedict XVI

The most radical political act there is is to be an optimist. The most radical political act there is is to believe that, if I change, other people will follow suit. — Colin Beavan

The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Storytellers, by the very act of telling, communicate a radical learning that changes lives and the world: telling stories is a universally accessible means through which people make meaning. — Chris Cavanaugh

To be truly happy in this world is a revolutionary act ... It is a radical change of view that liberates us so that we know who we are most deeply and can acknowledge our enormous ability to love. — Sharon Salzberg

That which makes the church "radical" and forever "new" is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not. In the church's view, the political left is not noticeably more interesting than the political right; both sides tend towards solutions that act as if the world has not ended and begun in Jesus. — Stanley Hauerwas

Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. — Terry Tempest Williams

this very act of consenting to its loss of control is itself the critical event of all crisis. To give up ones stature as the director of ones own existance: this is, for us, the ultimate death, the crisis that undermines our being in the most radical way. — Jerome A. Miller

Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character. — Robert Grudin

Discreetly keep most of your radical opinions to yourself. When with people be a listener a large part of the time. Be considerate in every word and act, and resist the tendency to say clever things. The best evidence of your culture is the tone and temper of your conversation. — Grenville Kleiser

Deep emotion in this age is a radical act. — Masha Tupitsyn

It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

This book will not
contain any panacea or dogma; I detest and fear dogma." ...
"This is not an ideological book except insofar as argument for change,"...
"ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth"...
" An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma. To begin with, he does not have a fixed truth. "...
" In the end he has one conviction - a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions.
I am not concerned if this faith in people is regarded as a prime truth and therefore a contradiction of what I have already written, for life is a story of contradictions. Believing in people, the radical has the job of organizing them so that they will have the power — Saul Alinsky

I think the people like myself who are in the center ground of politics and who think that center left and center right can cooperate and work together. Who don't like this sort of insurgent populism because we think it's not really going to deliver for the people, I think there's a big responsibility on us in the center to get our act together. And to work out radical but serious solutions to the problems people face. — Tony Blair

We need strength. We don't have it. When Jeb [Bush] comes out and he talks about the border, and I saw it and I was witness to it, and so was everyone else, and I was standing there, "they come across as an act of love," he's saying the same thing right now with radical Islam. — Donald Trump

I still don't know how to live my life except on my haunches at the feet of Jesus, eyes fixed on his face. Nothing else "works." No formula, no method makes me feel so fully human and alive as the radical act of living loved. — Sarah Bessey

Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster. — William Randolph Hearst

Do we have to wait until a disaster overwhelms us before we make the radical changes necessary to protect our world for future generations? That is the vital challenge of sustainable development. If we act now there is much that can be saved which will otherwise disappear forever — John Gummer

The crime of liberation theology was that it takes the Gospels seriously. That's unacceptable. The Gospels are radical pacifist material, if you take a look at them ... Liberation theology, in Brazil particularly, brought the actual Gospel to peasants. They said, let's read what the Gospels say, and try to act on the principles they describe. That was the major crime that set off the Reagan wars of terror. — Noam Chomsky

Most of you didn't think that helping people share books would be a subversive act ... Yet the fact is that you have chosen a profession that has become radical. — Naomi Klein

Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

The most radical act anyone can commit is to be happy. — Patch Adams

As the conversation continued it was clear that these were divided people. As artists as well as queers, these people wanted to be able to think in radical ways, to have insights, to realize, to make work that was outside of social assumptions, to be radical people who could-like the weary ACT UPers-achieve justice in some fashion. They admired their predecessors who had created change through confrontation, alienation, and truth telling. But their professional instincts led them in different directions: accommodation, social positioning, even unconscious maneuvering of the queer content they did have so that it was depoliticized, personalized, and not about power. — Sarah Schulman

Stirner's political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given ... Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual's action ... The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act. — John Carroll

The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection. — Richard Tarnas

If you're a woman and you've decided to step in front of people on any kind of platform and say that you have feelings about anything, you are committing a radical act. People view it as such, so you might as well actually commit a radical act. — Lizz Winstead

It has been said, "History is written by the victors." I take this to mean we can make ourselves victorious by writing, and then rewriting our own stories. In a country and culture so dominated by media, by the manipulation of words and stories, telling the tales of people whose stories historically have not been told is a radical act and I believe an act that can change the world and help rewrite history. — Jennifer Beals

We live, therefore, between Easter and the consummation, following Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and commissioned to be for the world what he was for Israel, bringing God's redemptive reshaping to our world.

Christians have always found it difficult to understand and articulate this, and have regularly distorted the picture in one direction or the other.

[ ... ]

When God does what God intends to do, this will be an act of fresh grace, of radical newness. At one level it will be quite unexpected, like a surprise party with guests we never thought we would meet and delicious food we never thought we would taste. But at the same time there will be a rightness about it, a rich continuity with what has gone before so that in the midst of our surprise and delight we will say, 'Of course! This is how it had to be, even though we'd never imagined it. — N. T. Wright

Teaching English is an intrinsically radical act. Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other? — Mary Rose O'Reilley

We've just learned how to balance ourselves a little better so that we're happier way more of the time than not, and, you know, being happy is a radical and desirable act if you ask me. — Anthony Kiedis

Movements are not radical. Movements are the American way. A small group of abolitionists writing and speaking eventually led to the end of slavery. A few stirred-up women brought about women's voting. The Populist movement, the Progressive movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's movement - the examples go on and on of 'little people' getting together and telling the truth about their lives. They made our government act. — Unita Blackwell

There was no censorship of the press: in general, the War Measures Act could have been made even more radical. — Robert Bourassa

I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiences. — Margaret J. Wheatley

Allowing for love is a radical act of saying yes to all of life. — Annette Vaillancourt

As a Jew, keeping kosher was tantamount to Peter's very faith and identity, but when following Jesus led him to the homes and tables of Gentiles, Peter had a vision in which God told him not to let rules - even biblical ones - keep him from loving his neighbor. So when Peter was invited to the home of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, he declared: "You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean" (Acts 10:28). Sometimes the most radical act of Christian obedience is to share a meal with someone new. — Rachel Held Evans

John's baptism ... was a radical act of individual commitment to belong to the true people of God, based on personal confession and repentance ... This is one of the main reasons that I do not believe in baptizing infants, who cannot make this personal commitment or confession or repentance. John's baptism was an assault on the very assumptions that give rise to much infant baptism. — John Piper

Because the soul has such deep roots in personal and social life and its values run so contrary to modern concerns, caring for the soul may well turn out to be a radical act, a challenge to accepted norms. — Thomas More

By sacrificing the public self, by shunning leaders, and especially by refusing to play the game of self-promotion, Anonymous ensures mystery; this in itself is a radical political act, given a social order based on ubiquitous monitoring and the celebration of runaway individualism and selfishness. Anonymous's iconography - masks and headless suits - visually displays the importance of opacity. The collective may not be the hive it often purports and is purported to be - and it may be marked by internal strife - but Anonymous still manages to leave us with a striking vision of solidarity - e pluribus unum. — Gabriella Coleman

...we can choose to reflect the places we see the lack of love in the world, or we could try to be stronger than our weaknesses, and shine a light on something better. We were facing down our own personal Goliaths. I wanted to invite her to stand with me and try the radical act of simply staying put. To tell the truth and trust that whatever comes next is going to be okay. — Sara Bareilles