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"When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid." - Audre Lorde

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"One finds limits by pushing them." - Herbert Simon

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You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Maya Angelou

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“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” —Barack Obama

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“It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly.” —Mabel Newcomber

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People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” —Nelson Mandela

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“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” —Mahatma Gandhi

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“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment to improve the world.” —Anne Frank

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“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.” –Barack Obama

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“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” –Thomas Edison

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“Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”  -Lin Yutang

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What will we choose?
Will we allow ourselves to descend
Into universal chaos and darkness?
A world without hope, without wholeness
Without moorings, without light
Without possibility of mental fight,
A world breeding mass murderers
Energy vampires, serial killers
With minds pining in anomie and amorality
With murder, rape, genocide as normality?

Or will we allow ourselves merely to drift
Into an era of more of the same
An era drained of significance, without shame,
Without wonder or excitement,
Just the same low-grade entertainment,
An era boring and predictable
‘Flat, stale, weary and unprofitable’

In which we drift
In which we drift along
Too bored and passive to care
About what strange realities rear
Their heads in our days and nights,
Till we wake too late to the death of our rights
Too late to do anything
Too late for thinking
About what we have allowed
To take over our lives
While we cruised along in casual flight
Mildly indifferent to storm or sunlight?

Or might we choose to make
This time a waking up event
A moment of world empowerment?
To pledge, in private, to be more aware
More playful, more tolerant, and more fair
More responsible, more wild, more loving
Awake to our unsuspected powers, more amazing.

We rise or fall by the choice we make
It all depends on the road we take
And the choice and the road each depend
On the light that we have, this light we bend,
On the light we use
Or refuse
On the lies we live by
And from which we die.

Extract taken from Wheatley, M (2002) Turning to One Another. San Francisco: Berrett Koehler.

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"Reality doesn't change itself. We need to act" - Margaret Wheatley

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"There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about" - Margaret Wheatley

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"It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgements about each other that do" - Margaret Wheatley