Social Awakening Quotes

The toilers have awakened to the new found power of organized effort.

I want to be known as a catalyst for change.

There are certain seasons in the course of human affairs, when Genius, Virtue, and Patriotism, seems to nod over the vices of the times.

Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity.

Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.

Living in a bubble as I said in a featherbed of privilege. That's why leaving home, leaving the prep school and going to the University of Michigan in the early '60s was a moment of awakening and to go to a place like Michigan and to see suddenly a world in flames and the injustices all around was quite a wake up call. I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.

What I would say to young women is: Pay attention to the real. Pay attention to what you're really thirsting for. What do you really want? And I think that's much harder to decipher in a culture that has no interest in it. What interests me is, are we going to wake in time? Are human beings going to wake up to ourselves, to the incredible poverty that's on this planet, to what we're doing to the earth, to what we're doing to women, to what we're doing to boys? That's what's important.

To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.

As you go through history, I didn't think it was going to get quite this close. So it's just one of those recurring things. I hope this doesn't come true in our country. Maybe the film will waken people to the situation.

We are in the middle of a world revolution, and I don't mean Communism. The revolution I'm talking about is that of the little, poor people all over the world. They're beginning to learn what there is in life, and to learn what they are missing.

End of Days is a lot of impact; it makes people open their eyes. It makes a statement.

Drag was like 'Alice in Wonderland,' where she fell into the hole and her world changed. I fell into a gay bar, and my entire world changed.

In order to make the changes work, the majority of members of society that has entered into the changes must wake up every morning with a feeling of the great historical moment, with the feeling of something big and extraordinary.

We've got the wind at our back right now. Americans are waking up to the realities of their previous choices. We must keep America moving back to preeminence because our values and conservative ideas are the world's greatest hope.

Signs everywhere now show a great moral awakening—the cleaning out of rotten business & still more rotten policies. But we’ve only begun! For the first time, men were questioning the fundamentals of democracy, inquiring whether we truly had self-government in America, or whether it had been corrupted by selfish interests. This questioning came not alone from what one might call the working class, but from middle America as well.

O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth! Then with passion would I shake the world, And rouse from sleep that fell anatomy Which cannot hear a lady's feeble voice, Which scorns a modern invocation.

It was only when I got to college that I realized that the rest of the world didn't run the way my world was run, and that there was a need for feminism. I'd thought it was all solved. There are people like my mom, clearly everyone is equal and it's all fine. Then I get into the world and I hear the things people are saying. Then I get to Hollywood and hear the very casual, almost insidious misogyny that just runs through so much of the fiction. It was just staggering to me.

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

But the world is out there, and it understands that the illusion of knowledge and freedom is not the same as the real thing. Eventually it will fade, and there are those who will do whatever it takes to make that happen sooner rather than later.

Just as the baby boom generation seemed to believe it was the first to discover sex, many of its members also seemed to think they were the first to discover the horrors of war.

Those who still believe the Brahmins should take a serious note of the changing times and start leading an awakened life.

I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that's always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.

I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure.

I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.

Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.