Starhawk Quotes - Page 4

a lot of people have been telling me how brave I am. I've always thought it was a mistake to get a reputation for courage, on the grounds that if you acted bravely once, people would expect you to act courageously again, and you might be having an off day.

[On 9/11:] ... those towers represented human triumph over nature. Larger than life, built to be unburnable, they were the Titanic of our day. For them to burn and fall so quickly means that the whole superstructure we depend upon to mitigate nature and assure our comfort and safety could fall.

In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control.

Magic has always been an element of Witchcraft, but in the Craft its techniques were practiced within a context of community and connection.

Amory Lovins says the primary design criteria he uses is the question How do we love all the children? Not just our children, not just the ones who look like us or who have resources, not just the human children but the young of birds and salmon and redwood trees. When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love. We are called to make the earth a place where all the children can thrive.

Only poetry can address grief.

Love is the glue that holds the world together.

The word "Witch" carries so many negative connotations that many people wonder why we use the word at all. Yet to reclaim the word "Witch" is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful; as men, to know the feminine within as divine.

Ritual and myth are like seed crystals of new patterns that can eventually reshape culture around them.

Love for life in all its forms is the basic ethic of Witchcraft.

Magic has often been thought of us the art of making dreams come true; the art of realizing visions. Yet before we can bring birth to the vision we have to see it.

In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.

To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up.

Only by transforming our own economy to one of peace can we make possible economic democracy in the Third World or our own country. The present economy generates wars to protect its profits and its short-term interests, while squandering the future. Unless we transform the economy, we cannot end war.

Where there's fear, there is power.

At this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that liberty and justice for all is a desirable thing.

Fascination with the psychic - or the psychological - can be a dangerous sidetrack on any spiritual path.

My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism. Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures.

If we are to reclaim our culture, we cannot afford narrow definitions.

At its essence, the message of the Occupations is simply this: ‘Here in the face of power we will sit and create a new society, in which you do count.’

Spirituality promotes passivity when the domain of spirit is defined as outside the world. When this world is the terrain of spirit, we ourselves become actors in the story, and this world becomes the realm in which the sacred must be honored and freedom created.

What we name must answer to us; we can shape it if not control it.

The healing of our relationship with place begins with the preservation of the natural environment. We cannot go to the wild for renewal if no wilderness is left.

Insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results.

From a magical point of view, the term 'nonviolence' doesn't work well. Every beginning Witch learns that you can't cast a spell for what you don't want - that the deep aspects of our minds are unclear on the concept of 'no.' If you tell your dog, 'Rover, I can't take you for a walk,' Rover hears 'Walk!' and runs for the door. If we say 'nonviolence,' we are still thinking in terms of violence.