When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist.
Prohibition cannot be enforced for the simple reason that the majority of American people do not want it enforced and are resisting its enforcement.
I think it's important for black people in general to be aware of what's going on and do what you got to work around it. Not bow down to it publicly.
Opposition to social change is but one pillar of contemporary Republicanism.
Drag resists conservatism in the most basic way possible, and also in the most effective way possible, because it's improper when it comes to looks, which is everything in conservative systems.
Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society.
Reconquer the streets, the markets - the public spaces, with the same message of opposition: We are devastated, but we will not give up. With torches and roses, we deliver this message to the world: We do not let fear break us. And we do not let the fear of fear silence us.
It's almost always dangerous to be right too soon.
In the early 50s in the US, there was what was called McCarthyism and the only reason it succeeded was that there was no resistance to it. When they tried the same thing in the 60s it instantly collapsed because people simply laughed at it so they couldn't do it. Even a dictatorship can't do everything it wants. It's got to have some degree of popular support.
To understand the fanatic rejection of women's liberation in the Muslim world, one has to take into account the time factor. Most of us educated women have illiterate mothers. The conservative wave against women in the Muslim world is a defense mechanism against profound changes in both sex roles and the touchy subject of sexual identity.
When other people reject positive changes you make for yourself, there is always some nerve to get to the root of in those other people.
Many new technologies come with a promise to change the world, but the world refuses to cooperate.
I say disallegiance rather than disobedience to emphasize the distinction between breaking the law—disobedience—and rejecting the sovereign’s claim to sovereignty—disallegiance …. We need disobedience and we should not be so quick to assume that disobedience is the same as disallegiance.
Capitalism’s intrinsic dynamism, however, produces insecurity along with benefits and so its advance has always met resistance…. It was only the creation of the modern welfare state in the middle of the 20th century that finally enabled capitalism and democracy to coexist in relative harmony.
When you say 'no' and you get on the streets and you do an act of civil disobedience, it changes your psychology.
Reducing poverty is a political challenge. It involves overcoming class-based interests in inequality and it requires effective institutions to deliver resources to and create opportunities for the poor, frequently in the face of local opposition. When poor women are the target of these kinds of interventions, resistance can be even more intense than opposition to pro-poor measures…. Notions of gender equality are profoundly counter-cultural in many societies …. Efforts to promote women’s equal entitlements to resources and equal opportunities to flourish in their productive and private lives encounter considerable social resistance. This resistance is often shared by development workers - from the top-level decision-makers to the "street-level" workers who implement policy
Let a man proclaim a new principle. Public sentiment will surely be on the other side.
Remarkable visions and genuine insights are always met with resistance.
It's funny because there's a part of me that, if something is popular, I sort of become a defiant teenager about it. Like, 'Oh, I'm not gonna like that because everybody likes it.'
That image of the countryside being a threatening place still exists. People continue to resist the challenge of learning about aspects of life they don't understand.
Anarchism...stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.
My novels are about a generation of Americans who lived between 1940 and 2000, who resisted the postwar political and cultural forces by choosing a wandering life of impoverishment and wonder. Inevitably, race and economics are a big part of their stories. Childhood, childishness, and children are never far.
We [the Rukus Society] created a culture of resistance where going to jail was considered a privilege. We refused bail, went to jail and took our lumps without complaining. We were confident of the support we had ...
I found that a whole series of people opposed me simply on the grounds that I was a woman. The clerics took to the mosque saying that Pakistan had thrown itself outside the Muslim world and the Muslim umar by voting for a woman, that a woman had usurped a man's place in the Islamic society.
At the beginning of anything out of the ordinary, the mass of the people always dislike it.
