Mairead Corrigan Maguire Quotes

We're building a movement. It's undeniably a work in progress, but there's a fundamental desire to see capitalism to do something different.

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

I want the system to change so I think you could call that a revolution.

I laid my hand on top of theirs, and all I could think was, Is this how revolutions begin? Not with a proclamation or a riot, but with a few people in a room somewhere with their hands clasped and a purpose.

A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.

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

What excites me is that, when things are tough, people become resourceful, and now with the Internet, social networking and the ability for people who in the past had been relatively powerless, they have tools to be able to spread ideas and organize. The urgency is there and the tools are there and I think that the possibility for really, really powerful results is there. I think it's all brewing, it's all bubbling up right now.

Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what "is" that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.

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.

The people themselves must think, because the people alone can act.

I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

I think we live in a period of profound transformation. Very similar to when we had a transition from agricultural societies to industrial societies.

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that the adversary has set out.

The great news is that that sort of group of people and that sort of sensibility is beginning to become more active again. And I think partly it just has to do with the time. It has to do with the culture of resistance. The necessity is for us to pull together and to speak up and to make work and be visible.

People can take power over their communities and over their lives. Some people don't realize they can do that. They think 'It's OK for other people, but I myself can't do it.' Hopefully, that will come out of the film.

Many young people are hungry for new thinking. So I invite them to use the tools and other resources we have developed to accelerate the shift from domination to partnership.

You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

I think people often forget how powerful they are. Sometimes it just takes one voice to save a life. When we speak up we can not only change a life or save a life, but we can also make it possible for other people to speak up. If we harness the collective power of people's voices around America to address the opioid epidemic, I have no doubt that we can overcome it.

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on.

I think we are making a mistake, a very big mistake if we look at what we call the Arab Awakening only by looking at the whole dynamics in political and not in economic terms.

The most radical thing we can do is connect people to one another. That starts conversations toward a vision for change.

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.