Rosa Parks Quotes

I think there's a weapon of cynicism to say, 'Protest doesn't work. Organizing doesn't work. Y'all are a bunch of hippies. You know, it doesn't do anything,' because, frankly, it's said out of fear, because it is a potent force for political change.

It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something.

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

Two's company and three's a crowd, but seven can be an uprising. And the seven can become 70 or 700 or 7000 very quickly if the sense of being wronged is felt broadly and truly enough.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

To pass a big idea in this town. You almost need social unrest

We are on the threshold of a significant breakthrough, and the greatest weapon is the mass demonstration.

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

You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.

There is no way a spirit of resistance that has sunk so deep in the population can be repressed.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

In our fight to get the SCS, we will use all forms, including protest, dialogue, and discussion, to get our goal.

The problem with Antigone is that she stood up to the despot Creon, but in such a way that she ended up dying. So she bought her defiance with her death. The real question I ended up asking was, "What would it mean for Antigone to have stood up to Creon and lived?" And the only way she could have lived is if she had had a serious social movement with her. If she arrived with a social movement to take down the despot, maybe it would have taken 18 days only, like in Egypt. It's really important to be able to re-situate one's rage and destitution in the context of a social movement.

58% of the American public are with us. We're preaching to the choir, but the choir's not singing, if all of the 58% started singing, this war would end.

If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.

The revolution is like a vessel filled with the pulsating heartbeat of millions of working people.

And the spirit of revolution will not die while the hearts of these workers continue to beat.

What if you threw a protest and no one showed up? The lack of angst and anger and emotion is a big positive.

One, a mass movement from within, which, as you know, is constantly being put down brutally but which, again, regroups and moves forward as is happening right now as we are speaking.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action.

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 Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it - and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.

There's a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn't have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I mean it's easier to be in a demonstration if it's a trip that's one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart in 1971, because it wasn't a trip any longer.