Cesar Chavez Quotes

And the spirit of revolution will not die while the hearts of these workers continue to beat.

The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

And I think we understand we cannot make social change for all workers until we have enough strength, membership strength, and at the same time having membership strength and only making change for a limited group of workers is not what our country really needs for people that work.

To denigrate the union movement in this way is to denigrate the right and the ability of people who are not rich to organize and to accomplish things together.

Starting that union was something I believed in very strongly.

I have known the fruits of strikes. The bitter and the sweet. Hunger and music.

Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.

Heed this cry that comes from the hearts of men. Organize the Unorganized.

It takes a lot of punishment to be able to do anything to change the social order.

I am not the least bit surprised that injustice persists. I'm also not surprised that resistance to injustice persists.

No one has a copyright on working-class struggles.

When a man or woman, young, or old, takes a place on the picket line for even a day or two, he will never be the same again.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress....This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.

The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life.

...the workers aren't going to stop struggling. They're going to struggle to have a union and they have the right to have it. The police repression and the grower indifference to the workers' demands for recognition cannot go unheard so we're going to keep on struggling until we get that recognition.

We are tired of words, of betrayals, of indifference...they years are gone when the farm worker said nothing an did nothing to help himself...Now we have new faith. Through our strong will, our movement is changing these conditions...We shall be heard.

Individual struggles merge into larger social movements.

I can't let time move on without fighting tooth and nail and hopefully being a part of a revolution that is positive.

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

There never was a social change in America without angry people at the heart.

There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.

When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.

This led me to understand that trade unionism, the instrument of working-class liberation and of social change could, and indeed should, be also an instrument of industrial progress.

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