Peter Yarrow Quotes

You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.

We have to realize we are building a movement.

Every great movement in the world starts with a tiny group of people who simply refuse to accept a situation.

Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.

We are at the point where we can mobilize all of this righteous indignation into a powerful mass movement.

Being part of social movements like Black Lives Matter or organizations like NAACP, or any group representing a cause, gives you more resources, knowledge, and power. They can help you use your voice.

In our fight to get the SCS, we will use all forms, including protest, dialogue, and discussion, to get our goal.

I think that we should remember that social change can happen when people join together with some strength.

In Chile, they had penas, where the community would come together to sing and plan how they were going to overthrow the government. There's a real hopefulness in that community style of organizing.

You are enough to start a movement. Individual people can come together around things that they know are unjust. And they can spark change.

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.

To be part of building a movement, you have to keep moving.

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

My take is that there's two ways to approach history. You sit in your armchair and you watch it on the news and you return to your PlayStation. Or you get out in the streets and you make it. Like, when those Supreme Court justices, you know, legalize desegregation, it wasn't due to their infinite wisdom. It's because people whose names you do not read about in history books, people whose faces you will never see, were the ones who struggled and sacrificed, sometimes gave their lives, to make this country a more equal one. When, it's like those people don't make history, it's us.

You can tell people of the need to struggle, but when the powerless start to see that they really can make a difference, nothing can quench the fire.

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.

We need to keep ringing the bell, wake people up to get our democracy together. Farm workers are like a symbol, and it is good that people are paying attention.

People must get active; go outside; get moving. This is a crucial time. You know, massive wealth and capital haven't budged one bit, so far. We have to give it a huge push if we want to see something different in our society. We need to create mechanisms and forms of organization which reflect the needs and wants of society as a whole, not just a privileged-oligarchic class of individuals.

If you care deeply about a cause and you are then engaged on behalf of that cause in an activity that makes you feel very good and very brave and you're really in solidarity with all your friends, and you're enjoying it, you're probably not advancing the cause very much, because you're spending all your time with people you agree with cheering each other on and not engaging.

I'm an activist; I have to be angry all the time. That's what we do!

Any protester knows that the only way activism works is to get the people on your side.

58% of the American public are with us. We're preaching to the choir, but the choir's not singing, if all of the 58% started singing, this war would end.

If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.

One little person, giving all of her time to peace, makes news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history.