Boots Riley Quotes

Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.

I'm an organizer at heart. Organizers know that giving information, being in front of people, talking to people, to build our movement for the kind of country that we see is the most important thing.

What excites me is that, when things are tough, people become resourceful, and now with the Internet, social networking and the ability for people who in the past had been relatively powerless, they have tools to be able to spread ideas and organize. The urgency is there and the tools are there and I think that the possibility for really, really powerful results is there. I think it's all brewing, it's all bubbling up right now.

Life in America is nothing but struggle, you gotta continue to try to overcome. Keep organizing, Obama said, keep organizing, grab a clipboard, get your signatures and start protesting, run for office yourself, but the shtruggle, the shtruggle is what defines us and we must continue with the shtruggle. Just pathetic, folks, the whole thing is pathetic.

Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.

I use doodling for a variety of reasons: I use it to get clarity around a concept, I use it to relax, I use it to communicate ideas with others and get their refinement of them, I use it to map complex systems for companies, I use it to run innovation games for business, I use it to get insight on something puzzling me.

When the youth of America gets together, amazing things happen.

Any institution faces two basic choices if they hope to spark new ideas. One is to leverage the brains trust within their organization by creating a special event dedicated to new thinking. The other is to look outside themselves to stimulate solutions.

The great thing about social movements is everybody gets to be a part of them.

I'm a great believer in our ability to come up with the ideas necessary to solve the big questions. I have less confidence that we'll be able to find a consensus about which ones are right without experiment.

The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it's to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they're valued.

I'm interested in people who can take the movement somewhere.

A lot of the Google inventions came from engineers just screwing around with ideas. And then management would see them, and we'd say, 'Boy, that's interesting. Let's add some more engineers.'

I'm incredibly impressed by people who organize to achieve a goal, and believe that they can make a difference and then go ahead and do just that. I think it's incredible.

You know, there's a lot of activism that doesn't deal with empowerment, and you have to empower yourself in order to be relevant to any type of struggle.

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.

Movements aren’t built on leadership but on the movement itself — of individuals taking that first step from inertia to action, as if passing through a doorway

Not every great idea needs to be Campbell-generated. It's clear that partners and vendors and other external sources will generate innovative ideas for us.

How can human rights be ever developed for the majority of Chinese people? The only way is to organize. To organize workers, peasants, merchants, industrialists, and students at the grassroots level.

I don't have to come up with the best idea. It is my job to make sure that it is always the best idea that wins.

The leaders come up from the volunteers that do the work, and it's amazing because then they do these incredible things in their community that they never thought they had the power to make that happen.

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

I think we sometimes forget that we have so many other places to create change. My dad taught me this, but the political is one spot to make change. But so is writing a book.

One of my main jobs is to cultivate advocates and activists.

Being able to chuck ideas around and bounce ideas off each other with anyone I'm working with is just something I love to do, that's how most of these ideas are formed.