Tom Hayden Quotes

Whenever anybody gets involved in politics, its always exciting for me because we take for granted our freedoms and our abilities to effect change through political activism.

If people don't vote, everything stays the same. You can protest until the sky turns yellow or the moon turns blue, and it's not going to change anything if you don't vote.

Just by making a decision to stay out of politics, you are making the decision to allow others to shape politics and exert power over you. And if you are alienated from the current political system, then just by staying out of it, if you do nothing to change it, you simply entrench it.

My politics of optimism and hope still casts its lot with the Democrats - in the optimistic hope that the dying embers of its status as the party of our better angels, one that took risks for social justice, can still be fanned into a flame. But I'm an old man, born in 1969.

I long for the day when there are things I feel strongly about politically.

You don't choose a party because it's the flavour of the month. I feel I will be able to work under a political system. I feel if people like me don't enter politics to bring change, who will?

When I turned 18, was the first time that I really started concentrating on politics. And I started doing so because I realized that in order to really create and generate change, it has to come from changing laws... so I started campaigning for Norman Lear's foundation, which was Declare Yourself.

If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It

The mythology is that political change happens only in election years. The truth is you build from election to election.

We have to become involved in the political process - if we don't like it, we can change it.

As Frederick Douglas, the famous abolitionist, said: "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will." You need the truth, and you also need a demand, and you need to bring that demand into the realm of electoral politics. If you don't do that, it's very hard to get such an entrenched machine to move.

Politics is an instrument that can transform society.

I think you have to ask yourself does voting work on the level that you are trying to effectuate change; that is the conversation you must have.

I think that politics needs a bit of spicing up.

Like a lot of people, I'm interested in public service and want to do as much as I can to change the direction of this country and will give some consideration to that after midterm elections.

I think the fact is that anybody who goes into politics feels like 'I can make a difference'. But it's not one person, you need so many others.

The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.

The only way to change is to vote. People are responsible.

Getting involved in politics was a quest for freedom.

Getting people to vote is the only way to break this tragic coalition in Congress.

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.

When I was very young and came into politics, I basically thought ideas would do the trick.

If you are conscious and really want change in this world, and you don't vote, then what was all the fighting for? All the things our parents and our parents' parents fought for?

What I don't like is when people don't like the establishment, they don't like the current government, they combat that by saying 'I don't like politics.' Go out, have your say, vote against the government. It's the most important thing.

If you want to change things, politics is the best way to do that.