Chinua Achebe Quotes

I laid my hand on top of theirs, and all I could think was, Is this how revolutions begin? Not with a proclamation or a riot, but with a few people in a room somewhere with their hands clasped and a purpose.

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.

Come senators, congressmen, Please heed the call, Don't stand in the doorway, Don't block up the hall, For he that gets hurt, Will be he who has stalled, The battle outside ragin', Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, For the times they are a-changin'...

I think that you're smarter than we were, but we had two things: one is, in our naïveté we believed we could change the world. And number two, we believed that another world was possible. And once that belief took hold of some critical mass, a tiny minority nonetheless, but a critical mass of people, then the world did change.

I think we're at a time where people just want to join together and cause change. People don't want to live like this any more.

I will never forget that the only reason I'm standing here today is because somebody, somewhere stood up for me when it was risky. Stood up when it was hard. Stood up when it wasn't popular. And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world.

The hope of remaking the world is indispensable in the struggle of oppressed men and women.

There is always room for Gramsci's "optimism of the will."

All change starts with a distant rumble at the grassroots level.

And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.

All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one-bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling your stomach. And pull, and pull, and pull. I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever. Take down the walls.

There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.

Sit up, join up, get on line, get in touch, find out who's raising hell and join them. No use waiting on a bunch of wussy politicians.

I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.

People power. It has no limits.

If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come through citizen's movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.

The lyrics stand today (1980). They're still my feeling about politics. I want to see the plan. I want to know what you're going to do after you've knocked it all down. I mean, can't we use some of it? What's the point of bombing Wall Street? If you want to change the system, change the system. It's no good shooting people.

Revolution is not something outside of us, but inside us, begging for our engagement every single day.

You can tell people of the need to struggle, but when the powerless start to see that they really can make a difference, nothing can quench the fire.

To change the world you'll need a pen.

Pick a movement, pick a revolution and join it.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

Good morning, Revolution: You're the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on