Advocacy Quotes

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
― Elie Wiesel

“They want us to be afraid.
They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes.
They want us to barricade our doors
and hide our children.
Their aim is to make us fear life itself!
They want us to hate.
They want us to hate 'the other'.
They want us to practice aggression
and perfect antagonism.
Their aim is to divide us all!
They want us to be inhuman.
They want us to throw out our kindness.
They want us to bury our love
and burn our hope.
Their aim is to take all our light!
They think their bricked walls
will separate us.
They think their damned bombs
will defeat us.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that my soul and your soul are old friends.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that when they cut you I bleed.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that we will never be afraid,
we will never hate
and we will never be silent
for life is ours!”
― Kamand Kojouri

“To say nothing is saying something. You must denounce things you are against or one might believe that you support things you really do not.”
― Germany Kent

“I know you can't live on hope alone; but without hope, life is not worth living. So you, and you and you: you got to give them hope; you got to give them hope.”
― Harvey Milk

“..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

“Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.”
― Bill Drayton, Leading Social Entrepreneurs Changing the World

“Poverty is not only a lack of money, it's a lack of sense of meaning.”
― David Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

“I spend half my time comforting the afflicated, and the other half afflicting the comfortable.”
― Wess Stafford

“An idea is like a play. It needs a good producer and a good promoter even if it is a masterpiece. Otherwise the play may never open; or it may open but, for a lack of an audience, close after a week. Similarly, an idea will not move from the fringes to the mainstream simply because it is good; it must be skillfully marketed before it will actually shift people's perceptions and behavior.”
― David Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

“If you believe in a cause, be willing to stand up for that cause with a million people or by yourself.”
― Otis S. Johnson, From "N Word" to Mr. Mayor: Experiencing the American Dream

“It can be difficult to speak truth to power. Circumstances, however, have made doing so increasingly necessary.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. They wanted to act, to do something, to make life better for other people—and they have.”
― Morgan Carroll, Take Back your Government: A Citizen's Guide to Grassroots Change

“They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I took mine and fell flat on my face. As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving. Indeed, when I was there, I saw some of the worst that good intentions, traditional charity, and aid can produce...

I concluded that if I could only nudge the world a little bit, maybe that would be enough.

But nudging isn't enough.”
― Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

“Entrepreneurial quality - is by far the toughest (criterion for a social entrepreneur).. For every one thousand people who are creative and altruistic and energetic, there's probably only one who fits this criterion, or maybe even less than that. By this criterion...we do not mean someone who can get things done. There are millions of people who can get things done. There are very, very few people who will change the pattern in the whole field.”
― Bill Drayton

“The first - the most obvious (test of a true social entrepreneur) - is are they possessed, really possessed by an idea... The idea - making it happen across society - is something they are married to in the full sense of the word. One key test of that is this: Is this an idea that you see growing out of their whole life? I get very, very suspicious when I see someone who had an idea two years ago. It just doesn't ring true. Because with the typical entrepreneur you can see the roots of the interest when they're very young. There's a real coherence to people's lives.”
― Bill Drayton

“Over the past century, researchers have studied business entrepreneurs extensively..

In contrast, social entrepreneurs have received little attention. Historically, they have been cast as humanitarians or saints, and stories of their work have been passed down more in the form of children's tales than case studies. While the stories may inspire, they fail to make social entrepreneurs' methods comprehensible. One can analyze an entrepreneur, but how does one analyze a saint?”
― David Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

“As helpers, we often feel the need to see our impact in tangible, measurable ways. We allow negative language into our head about the “broken system;” we look through a lens of “it doesn’t matter, I can’t make a difference”. These ideas are surely contributing to our burnout.”
― Jenn Bruer, Helping Effortlessly: A Book of Inspiration and Healing

“As a pregnant urologist,… I was often asked by hospital workers and physicians if I was going to circumcise the baby. I always answered a simple “no” immediately, without adding the unnecessary caveat that I already knew I was carrying a girl. Knowing that in some parts of the world circumcising girls (female genital mutilation) is as common a practice as circumcising boys, I wanted to use this to spark rethinking every chance I had. When the questioner would find out I knew I was having a girl and tried to use that to explain my choice to not circumcise, I told them, “I wouldn’t circumcise if the child were a boy, either.”
― Adrienne Carmack, Reclaiming My Birth Rights

“It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell. Wilbur Storey”
― Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion

“Though either choice was good, one was truer to myself... Ultimately, I reflected on Geothe's invocation to 'make a commitment and the forces of the universe will conspire to make it happen' and chose the uncharted path.”
― Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

“Joyfully we undertake our daily work.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“You can not protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they MUST protect them.”
― Dr. Wangari Maathai

“Every dictator gets rid of the artist first... They burn the books and execute the artist first... Art might do something. It's dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison

“Everybody has the right to form their own opinion and read what they like and come to their own conclusion about it... I trust the reader.”
― Philip Pullman

“If you start reading a book and you don't like it you always have the option of shutting it. At this point it loses its capacity to offend you.”
― Salman Rushdie

“The seven core members also became more involved in local Minneapolis politics. Drawing attention at a national level had been the driving impetus of the earlier Black Lives Matter protests, which had relied on getting that hashtag to spike. Now it was clear that if their focal point was police funding, it would need to be a local effort, dependent on a partnership with the city council and the mayor's office, where these budgetary decisions were made. They would need to learn the mechanics and make some allies.

This was organizing as it had long been done, and they got good at it. It was also, in a way, what separated Minneapolis from Cairo. Whereas the Middle East lacked a democratic or grassroots political tradition-and had no way to even imagining how to create one-this wasn't the case in America....But there was a long history of African American organizing that predated Silicon Galley. Miski and their friends got to know city council members and their aides, inundated them with research material, visited their offices, and maybe most important, brought people out to hearings when the budget was being discussed, arguing in forum after forum against the belief that all the police needed were a few more bodycams. All this happened without much fanfare and largely off-line.”
― Gal Beckerman, The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas

“Bronva Browser extends our privacy advocacy. With pre-installed privacy-focused extensions, it goes beyond a mere browser; it's a statement that online activities should be shielded from intrusive tracking and ads. Privacy should be a default, not an add-on.”
― James William Steven Parker

“If there are gates in your boundaries you have a freeway in the making.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“When sharing your thoughts about an incident, such as a microaggression, approach the person who made the comment as an ally. Social advocacy is more effective when you start with “calling people in” to dialogue instead of “calling them out” or simply critiquing them.

Todd Kashdan, author ofThe Art of Insubordination,said that “calling in” is ultimately about admitting that we’re all of the same nature. “We all have flaws, make mistakes, and often don’t have the energy or mental capacity to do the things we care about. What’s important is we acknowledge it and choose to do better,” Kashdan adds.”
― Evelyn Nam