Wendell Phillips Quotes

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.

The really critical thing isn't who's sitting in he White House, but who is sitting in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating ? - those are the things that determine what happens.

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

Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the 'demands' of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world.

Agitation is the marshalling of the conscience of a nation to mold its laws.

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

Democracy comes alive not when government does anything, because government cannot be depended on to rectify serious injustices. It comes alive when people organize and do something about it.

You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.

Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.

I think we need to raise our voices, and we need to demonstrate to the people we represent, as well as the American people, that their leaders have a responsibility to take action.

Each of us should choose which course of action we must take; education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes, but let it not be said that we did nothing.

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

Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.

We must stop being polite and behaved and find new inventive tactics to shift the paradigm. We are the majority.

We are intent on building a movement. The next step is grassroots town meetings. We must keep alive the dialogue around the covenants.

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

If the government or the parties won't address our needs, we will. It's about direct action, even civil disobedience.

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.

If civil disobedience is the way to go about change, than I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco

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 democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come through citizen's movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.

By dint of that concern and because that society was willing to examine its particular reality, Solidarity could come into existence.

We're here to let the Democrats know that the grass roots and the anti-war movement elected them to create change.

Pick a movement, pick a revolution and join it.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.