Cory Booker Quotes

Public service and community organizing and movement building is such a part of my DNA that it's really hard to separate it.

I thought my parents were always having card parties - and they were - but they were actually also having meetings to organize people. My older sister would be part of youth organizing, and she'd have dance parties. People would be dancing and talking about how to improve their neighborhood.

The work of community, love, reconciliation, restoration is the work we cannot leave up to politicians. This is the work we are all called to do.

Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.

The Ways and Means Committee for me has this opportunity to work with programs where I can take my parents' sense of community and make it work.

The temptations are great to simply retreat to the domain of private life and give up on our public problems.

I didn't come from a background of films. I didn't even really ever watch films. The fact is, my parents weren't into that stuff, and neither was I.

I continue to be moved by the knowledge that a group of organized people can effectively pressure government if they come up with data instead of rhetoric.

Trying to learn from communities and engage with policy makers and community organizers all across the country is really important to me.

Our Revolution has been the keeper of the flame doing the vital work of building a grassroots movement that leverages the people's agenda.

There is nothing that says you can't be active and love your community and fight for your community and still do your job.

To rebuild confidence in the power of people working together to create something better, we must give people the power to do precisely that for themselves.

Baltimore is a beautiful city. I started doing a lot of community organizing back in 1999 and met so many great people in neighborhoods all across the city. And that was an invaluable experience.

People may recognize me as some sort of superhero, but it's different. Spider-Man and all these other superheroes, they get superpowers and do what they want to save the city. If we need to save Hong Kong, we can't rely on superpowers, we can just rely on the people.

I still believe in the power of government to make lives better, and I believe that if someone is willing to take a stand, other people will follow.

When things happen socially in our community, as artists, we've got the right to exercise our voices if we choose to, use our powers for good.

You have to decide to create the society you want to create, and that's done through politics.

I'm definitely active in the community down there in Charleston.

Be an active participant in your community and country. Every small gesture makes up the big gestures. Resist, rinse, repeat.

We can see, from California to New York, from Maine to Florida, Seattle to New Mexico - everywhere there are women's groups. Everywhere there are women who have gotten together to examine global warming, and women who have gotten together to prepare each other for single parenting - there are women who have come together to be supportive to those whose mates are in prison, male or female, partners are in prison. All sorts of gatherings of women. I mean, I'm just celebrating my 80th year on this planet, and I look back 50 years ago and there was nothing like that.

I don't think I'm more politically-based as much as socially-based. My grandmother died on February 29th, and she kept all of my magazine and newspaper scraps, every interview. I've been in the newspapers since I was about 15 - not for rapping, but for real substantive stuff I was doing in the community, organizing around gang violence in the schools. So I had already made my grandma proud before I was on TV. I've always been who I am.

If you care deeply about a cause and you are then engaged on behalf of that cause in an activity that makes you feel very good and very brave and you're really in solidarity with all your friends, and you're enjoying it, you're probably not advancing the cause very much, because you're spending all your time with people you agree with cheering each other on and not engaging.

Nations are not built by governments alone. The government can at best be a facilitator, and a trigger for society's innate entrepreneurial and creative instincts.

We need leaders who are willing to stand up, drive the debate, and commit our fellow citizens to action.

Part of the role that I am fulfilling as Governor General is to highlight what communities can do together.