Chris Hedges Quotes

The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson and Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war movement. It was the civil rights movement, not compelling arguments, that convinced members of Congress to end legal racial discrimination.

You need to remind people that you vote, you matter, and that they can’t succeed without your help.

We Communists must be able to integrate ourselves with the masses in all things. If our Party members spend their whole lives sitting indoors and never go out to face the world and brave the storm, what good will they be to the Chinese people? None at all, and we do not need such people as Party members. We Communists ought to face the world and brave the storm the great world of mass struggle and the mighty storm of mass struggle.

There's a reason people pause their lives to engage in political activism and pressure their local political leaders. Because as a whole, even if you can't identify any one instance, as a whole pressure works and sometimes it starts with something as simple as pushing the button on the intercom.

I believe that social change has almost reached critical mass. So many people have undergone personal transformation that their effect on society is having a geometric - not arithmetic - impact. This coalescence of energies brings about meeting, networking, and a sophistication in communications that is unprecedented in history.

America won't be saved because one or 10 people stand up. It will be saved because millions of us stand up.

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

Historically, mass demonstrations have worked best at shifting public opinion and pressuring the powers-that-be when organizers highlighted one concrete demand: 'Bring Our Boys Home from Vietnam'; 'End Segregation Now'; 'Support Women's Right to Choose.'

There is that much to be done that no select or small portion of people can do; only the greater mass of the Irish nation will ensure the achievement of a Socialist Republic, and this can only be done by hard work and sacrifice.

Many people have placed great hopes in our movement.

I sort of have this feeling about change in general. We can make baby steps on a macro level. We can try to shift policy, voting and changing who's in office. But we can make huge, sweeping changes on a personal level and in your immediate circle, or just the people around you.

Dealing with politicians, that's a little different. But government doesn't change until people demand it.

No one can create a movement. No one can create a Gandhi.

Sometimes things need to get really bad before they can ever get better. Really bad can become untenable if enough people get sick of it. That was a big thing about why I ended up taking part in that rally [against police brutality] and ended up voicing my opinion and declaring what side I was standing on.

I have spent the last 30 years forming the religious right. I write a letter every week and send a newspaper every month to 200,000 pastors who are broadly called evangelicals, bringing them up to date on what is happening in Washington, in the state capitals, in the culture, and what we need to do about it. And of course I'm criticized for it, and of course I have calculated the positives and the negatives, but I have long been at peace with what I do.

When people start to complain, "Voting doesn't matter," I'm like, the people of Wisconsin weren't boycotting and hitting the streets and blowing up those rooms because voting didn't change those situations for them. That was their livelihood. There's revolution going on all over the world because they actually can't have a voice.

Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.

If the people really set their minds on anything it is impossible to prevent their getting what they want.

We must all move shoulder to shoulder in a unified front to show this administration that the true majority of people are willing to vote for a cleaner environment and won't back down.

Movements of people create change - not just any one person or organization, but when lots of people are in motion around a shared vision.

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

But my belief is growing that our political and social evils are remediable, if only all of us who want a change for the better just get up and work for it, all the time, with as much knowledge and intelligence as we can muster for it. Half the wrongs of human life exist because of the inertia of people who simply will not use their energies in fighting for what they believe in. And finally the wrongs roll up into world catastrophes and millions of deaths and a terrible set-back for all mankind.

Satyagraha is a process of educating public opinion, such that it covers all the elements of the society and in the end makes itself irresistible.

We need a strategy. And the goal is to bring millions of people together.

The point is change can come about, but it only comes about when millions of people are actively involved in political struggle, the billionaires may have the money, but we have the people.