Atishi Quotes

I'm totally down with insurrection in the street. I've had a great time with that over the years. Insurrection in the voting booth is the other part of the equation.

Traditionalists will have to master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.

You know, I was a community activist, so I'm used to standing out in front of an elected official's office and protesting.

Yet what you need is not marches, demonstrations, rallies or wide associations, all of them are important. What you need is direct action. The sooner people understand that, the sooner we'll begin to change things.

Politics colours everything, and anyone who wants change is necessarily political. As an environmental campaigner more or less since I left school in the early '90s, I have always been involved in lobbying, campaigning and pushing for changes.

Activists are generally doers - rather than watching television and thinking about the world they will put there energies into doing something 'active' to change the (political) situation.

I spent 10 years fighting for reform in Cook County, and I didn't change my DNA when I got to Washington.

If you don't like what's going on, you have to get involved.

Republicans lobby; Democrats march.

Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.

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.

I am not naive enough to believe that voting is the only way to bring about transformational change, just as I know that protest alone is not the sole solution to the challenges we face.

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

Civil disobedience is a viable political tactic, and a non-violent tactic.

One does not necessarily have to wait for a revolutionary situation: it can be created.

I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

There is a weapon we can fight with. That is the weapon of political action.

Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.

There are ways to pursue political change. In a democracy, it's through the ballot box. There are other ways, and many democracies have many different systems of democracy.

We can all become activists and raise questions.

My early years as a political activist were dominated by the poll tax.

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.

I grew up with protests, marches, demonstrations, struggle. But I come from a clan of community workers.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

Rebellion is obsolete - change things from the inside working out.