Bill McKibben Quotes

Young people have so much more power than they tend to think to be able to affect politics. And if people will organize and get involved and go out and knock on doors and hand out leaflets and make a change, then they can determine the future.

You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.

Part of organizing is that we’re not all going to be marching in the same rhythm. It’s messy, and that’s the beauty of it.

We live in the age of communication. Write letters to the editor. Speak to your congressman, to your senator. If you are young, especially young people are taken by this human rights activities. They should organize the universities.

Sit up, join up, get on line, get in touch, find out who's raising hell and join them. No use waiting on a bunch of wussy politicians.

Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

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

You have to try to build support around causes. It is uniting to campaign on a single issue, and it is never just a single issue; it's always more than that.

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

You can't build a lasting political movement based on hostility to government.

View talk radio not as entertainment but as a tool for organizing and action.

Change never comes from the White House. It comes from your house and my house.

Collective action is a means of power, a means by which individuals can more fully realize their individual values.

All across the country, the Women's March inspired doctors and teachers and mothers to become activists and organizers and, yes, candidates for office.

Our Revolution has been the keeper of the flame doing the vital work of building a grassroots movement that leverages the people's agenda.

I think there's a weapon of cynicism to say, 'Protest doesn't work. Organizing doesn't work. Y'all are a bunch of hippies. You know, it doesn't do anything,' because, frankly, it's said out of fear, because it is a potent force for political change.

We can't sit around waiting for big government, big business, big religion etc. to save us. We need to get informed and take inspired action.

We the voice of the young world. We the voice of the people.

Activism in the street is truth-telling, and organizing is talking to people for a specific goal.

There are real possibilities of reaching many of the Trump voters: many of them in fact voted for Obama, believing his rhetoric about "change," and upon realizing that they were deluded, have turned to Trump. And will find that they are again deluded. That's an opportunity that can be grasped, by organizing, education, activism right now.

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

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

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.

If scientists and scholars were to become "collectively self-organised and consciously activist" today, they would probably devote themselves to service to state and private power. Those who have different goals should (and do) become organized and activist.

The so-called resistance is very broad and we don't agree on everything, but there's a moment of opportunity when people are paying attention. It's time for us to really get serious about political education and about our own moral education in this moment, and to seize this opportunity to organize and be in deep dialogue with a whole lot of people who never even thought about being politically engaged or active before. There's real hope there and real opportunity.