Naomi Klein Quotes

Grasp Revolution

There never was a social change in America without angry people at the heart.

If a person with a bullet in Dallas can change the world, imagine a person with an idea could do.

Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the universe.

Organizations don’t make revolutions. People do.

Something is stirring in the hearts and minds of the people.

It is not leaders who make movements; it is movements that make leaders.

Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.

We are at the point where we can mobilize all of this righteous indignation into a powerful mass movement.

… utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

A Left that does nothing achieves nothing.

No one can create a movement. No one can create a Gandhi.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

We talking about revolution because that's the era that you're caught in.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people.

For any movement to gain momentum, it must start with a small action. This action becomes multiplied by the masses, and is made tangible when leadership changes course due to the weight of the movement's voice.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

If you compromise in any kind of movement or any kind of wave of revolution, if you sort of play the game, things are gonna change far more slowly than you need them to.

We are here to make another world.

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.

Back in those days we thought we could change the world.