Bill Clinton Quotes

change starts at the bottom. I think we're disempowered by the idea that it starts at the top, when really change is like a tree. It does start at the bottom.

I don't think it's necessary to feel guilty. Because I know that I'm still doing the work that is going to help more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system, and I'm trying to use whatever knowledge I was able to acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move us forward.

Collectively, we activists are essential to advancing U.S. policy to help empower marginalized people to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty for good.

Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.

If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people's lives are better, you know it's hard, and some people think it's boring.

Once I learned about grassroots organizing, I got so enamored with it because I thought 'Wow this is the way you do it!'

Acting is one thing, but actually trying to change the world and the way people think to make people's lives better? That's the stuff I'm most proud of.

People in Detroit aren't just urban gardening. They're starting a new mode of education. They're trying to give children the education to be "solutionaries" rather than people who are going to get jobs in the system. And that is a huge change, a cultural revolution. The things that are happening in Detroit would amaze you if you're used to only looking at statistics, and only thinking of blacks as sufferers and not as activists.

The future's so random, and so mobile, there's no way you're going to get to your vision of what you want your community to be just by chance alone. I really believe you have to let people know, to use your voice, to say, 'this is what I like about my place, I want to keep it this way, this is what I think can be improved, this is what I disapprove of.' That's the only way you can have a part in shaping the future.

Real change never occurs from the top on down, [but] always from the bottom on up.

When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.

I'll keep this as nonpartisan and diplomatic as possible - but for those of us whose heads are kind of spinning off and are really engaged in what's happening right now and trying to effect change where we can, when we can, I think we also need to express ourselves and express our anger and also find joy in things like The Golden Girls right now.

I heard of Martin Luther King Jr. when I was 15 years old. I heard of Rosa Parks. And I met Dr. King in 1958 at the age of 18. I met Rosa Parks ... But to pick up a fun comic book - some people used to call them "funny books" - to pick this little book up, it sold for 10 cents, 12 pages or 14 pages? 14 pages I digested. And it inspired me. And I said to myself, "If the people of Montgomery can do this, maybe I can do something. Maybe I can make a contribution."

I believe education is the key. As an activist and a child of the developing world, I witnessed education's power to transform lives.

Most of the time we do nothing, myself included, I think the lesson I learned from [playing humanitarian Tessa in The Constant Gardner] is that a lot of drops make up an ocean. If people would stand up and say what they believe in maybe we can make a difference. Helping one person is better than nothing. Just do something.

I actually do not think that's how what's happening to our government is going to be stopped. I think people who are willing to be civically engaged and believe in the promises and the progress of the last fifty years that will save this country.

I think we should keep voting, I think we should keep supporting things that we believe in. I don't think we ought to just quit.

Most of you didn't think that helping people share books would be a subversive act...Yet the fact is that you have chosen a profession that has become radical.

The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future.

The good news is I think there are a lot of young people certainly who were involved in my campaigns, and I think continue to be involved in work not just politically, but through nonprofits and other organizations, that can carry this hard work of democracy forward.

We the people are the change makers.

Of course, we have leaders in the African American community as well that we've all worked with. One of the great rewards of being an activist is that you get to meet all these wonderful people. And there are many unsung heroes. There are so many out there that are good people that are working hard.

I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win.

I've been criticized by many anarchists as believing that anarchism is impossible without affluence. On the contrary, I think affluence is very destructive to anarchism. If you are absorbed by that commodity world then you're not going to move toward any radical positions, you're going to move toward a stance of protectiveness.

That signal's come and gone a lot in my life-time, that prairie progressivism died . I think prairie progressivism is still there. Every once in a while, odd things take place.