British Activist Quotes

Annie Besant

Julie Christie

Mairead Maguire

Peter Tatchell

Claudia Jones

Robert Blatchford

Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton

Violence, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the anarchist philosophy. It has repeatedly been pointed out by anarchist thinkers that the revolution can neither be won, nor the anarchist society established and maintained, by armed violence.

Vernon Richards

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy. By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

To me, a good family is the basis of democracy and is democratic to the core. That's why the feminists had to destroy it.

I do soundbites. Remember, I'm the druid that kicks arse — I'm not the druid that gets up there and waffles for 3 hours.

Arthur Uther Pendragon

Tony Blair and his ministers are operating on a 'pollute now, pay later' policy. Farm-scale trial plots are rather like letting a rat with bubonic plague out into the environment and then seeing what happens.

On GM foods

All women are aware of that moment when suddenly the boys don't look at you. It's a fairly common thing, when suddenly you no longer attract that instant male attention because of the way you look. I never really knew how to enjoy beauty, but it took the form of a subconscious arrogance, expecting things, all muddled up with celebrity.

A people's art is the genesis of their freedom.

"Atheist" is quite clear in its meaning of "somebody without a belief in God." It is more complex in its usage since it has often been used to blacken anyone with the slightest doubt about the teachings of religion.

I shall die... as I have lived, rationalist, socialist, pacifist, and humanitarian.

Henry Stephens Salt

How ridiculous we often are in our negations, our strutting self importance, our penchant for making labels and sticking them on people. As though labelling a person disposed of him!

Debates and parliamentary divisions are fruitless cosmetic exercises given the Tories' present Commons majority. And if we recognise this, we are either forced to accept Tory edicts as a fait accompli or we must look to new more militant forms of extra-Parliamentary opposition which involve mass popular participation and challenge the Government's right to rule.

For far too many, pregnancy and birth is still something that happens to them rather than something they set out consciously and joyfully to do themselves

Sheila Kitzinger

Knowledge can be like the skin on the surface of the water in a pond, or it can go all the way down to the mud. It can be the tiny tip of the iceberg or the whole hundred percent.

Quentin Crisp said it to me; now I say it to you: say yes to everything.

In fact if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to a lot of animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.

With all the clever brains in America it would be great to see more investment and focus on this essential research!

Louise Burfitt-Dons

But most of all I was inspired by the stirring examples of all the other runners. In some pictures they would seem like tiny dots in a mosaic, but each had a separate narrative starting a few months or a lifetime earlier and finishing that day in the New York City Marathon, the race with 37,000 stories.

We know how it feels to be in the wrong and have someone shout at us or frown and walk past, we feel dreadful. We try to be friendly but so often it turns into a strained smile as someone replies curtly and asks what we want.

Michael Elmore-Meegan

It's not necessarily against a system that it collapses, because most systems do collapse in the end. That's a part of the wheel of life - systems do collapse. So I'm to some extent slightly inclined to forgive capitalism for being about to collapse. I mean there are lots of fine things, lots of love affairs and the like which have come to a sticky end. On the other hand, it is quite an accusation - quite hard for it to live down - that it's going to destroy the entire planet with it.

In today's Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest among us are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities' constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming.

Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

Why, since people must outnumber the minority that comprises the State and its oppressive forces, have they submitted so meekly to it?

Autonomy is the capacity to act on principles that are one's own and one will exercise this capacity by means of a process of rational reflection on these principles. Autonomy is thought to be necessary for attributing political responsibility.

The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity.

Perhaps the greatest contribution that those of us who come from a Christian tradition can make is to throw out the old just-war theory, embrace the nonviolence of Jesus, refuse to kill one another, and truly follow his commandment to "love our enemies.

Mairead Maguire