Boots Riley Quotes

In Russia the workers are powerless, kept in spiritual as well as physical bondage. The American workers are free to take up the fight, free to act, to read, to publish, to discuss, to instruct themselves, to combine in unions, to assemble in meeting, to strike. Hence it is only here [America] that the fight for peace can begin…. The [solution] consists in mass-actions of American workers against capitalist power. If they should proceed to wrench the decision on policy from big capital, the most essential step to deter the threat of atomic war would be made

How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?

When cultural movements happen, it's so beyond your control.

We're building a movement. It's undeniably a work in progress, but there's a fundamental desire to see capitalism to do something different.

A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical changes in the United States. Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may even have broken continuity with history... this benign conspiracy for new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

I believe that reforms will not really take hold if they do not gradually come into the culture of the people.

It is nonsense to say that Germans are unable to change.

The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has - from industrial age to information age - there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.

If we don't change our culture, the politics is going to migrate more and more to statism.

We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.

The class barricades have been stormed by the forces of a broad culture, which is made up of clusters of individuals who have decided for themselves what they will be in society.

I think culture is a very challenging thing to reverse.

The thing is, getting rid of racism is a cultural thing that takes decades. It's not something we can solve immediately. Structural changes have to happen in our culture.

All I've ever wanted to do is move the needle on popular culture.

The labor movement was the principal force that transforme­d misery and despair into hope and progress.

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.

Neither one of us believe that you can fix the culture from within by just throwing money and people at the system. There has to be a systemic change within the system.

Together we can change our culture for the better by ending violence against women and girls, artists have a unique power to change minds and attitudes and get us thinking and talking about what matters, and all of us, in our lives, have the power to set an example. Join our campaign to stop this violence.