Leonard Peltier Quotes

The only way change happens is when people become more significantly involved in the political process.

The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people.

I know one thing: that you can do a lot of things but if you don't educate people into conscious anarchism it gets frittered away.

It's important that people press from the outside. It's important that people are able to make change from the inside. Both of those things are important. Protest is fundamentally a political act.

You can't expect people who didn't exist as a community at all until about twenty years ago to have formed a political movement. This attack on the LGBT community was very shocking to the people who consider themselves to be activists. They're basically playing in the sandbox, and there's a tank coming! And what are they supposed to do - use the plastic shovel to push the tank back? But since the homosexual propaganda legislation, people have really stepped up, educated themselves politically, and grown by leaps and bounds.

Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.

President Obama started in public life not as an elected official but as a community organizer. He worked with churches and other groups on the south side of Chicago to push public leaders to fight poverty, improve the local school system and make housing more affordable, and to bring about the change the community needed and deserved.

We can't just assume that this resistance is going to produce the kinds of candidates or the kinds of parties that will truly honor people of all colors, all backgrounds, all ethnicities, from every nation and every faith and every gender, unless we do the work in our own communities of organizing and being in deep dialogue with one another across all forms of difference. It's my hope that we'll seize this opportunity and not let the moment pass.

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.

A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.

The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.

It's the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there's still hope.

We have to get back down to basics. We have to start organizing at the neighborhood level to get people educated to vote.

Most of my work for the past 25 years has been devoted to organizing demonstrations, benefits and campaigns, many of which have had the effect of bringing a policy debate to public focus or moving a political agenda forward. It's become a cliché to say 'think globally and act locally,' but it works.

"The life of the union depends upon more people getting to share the limelight, because with the limelight also comes responsibility and with the responsibility comes a little sharing of the load." "There isn't enough money to organize poor people. There never is enough money to organize anyone. If you put it on the basis of money, you're not going to succeed."

Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for ever more state intervention in practically all fields.

I think we're at a time where people just want to join together and cause change. People don't want to live like this any more.

Democracy depends on people speaking out, and in times of great crisis, on people creating a commotion.

The idea of protest organizing, as summarized by community organizer Saul Alinsky, is that if we put enough pressure on the government, it will do things to help people. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking. But with globalization and the weakening of the nation-state, that kind of organizing doesn't work.

The more people that understand and are made able to spot liberalism, and then the more people are able to associate liberalism with the problems in their lives, the political problems, the economic problems, the more people can be conditioned and educated to understand that liberalism is the problem, coupled with the ability to spot it, would be the fastest way to eradicate it. It would be really helpful if we had a Republican Party engaged in this.

You keep plugging away--that's the way social change takes place. That's the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.

Now people are really inspired to do a lot, and the fire got lit under our asses to be more politically aware and be more politically involved in our community and pay more attention to what's going on.

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

Ordinary people can bring about change.

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.