Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

The gatekeepers don't control the gates, and the powers that be aren't as powerful.

Culture follows power.

Our goal is to displace the entrenched powers in Washington, restore the rightful balance between the state and federal government.

Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but simply change the faces of those in charge.

It's going to be fun to watch and see how long the meek can keep the earth once they inherit it.

The purpose of the minority is to become the majority.

Thus, the forces and value systems that are most threatened by this shift are becoming the most coherent and are rising to the top as minority or plurality powers. But they do not represent either the shift, the change, or the future.

Those above are going down, those below are going up.

Revolutions are not improvised. They are not made at will by individuals, and not even by the most powerful associations. They come about through force of circumstances, and are independent of any deliberate will or conspiracy.

The power of the crown, almost dead and rotten as prerogative, has grown up anew, with much more strength and far less odium, under the name of influence.

Power is becoming more diffuse every day.

All power is fast getting into the hands of the very lowest people.

… relative positions have a way of changing. When the underdog becomes top dog, he is hardly likely to go on considering himself bound by a bad bargain he entered into unwillingly.

In a county where power is in the hands of the local tyrants and evil gentry, the magistrate, whoever he may be, is almost invariably a corrupt official. In a county where the peasants have risen there is clean government, whoever the magistrate.

From the moment when a subordinate class becomes really independent and dominant, calling into being a new type of State, the need arises concretely, of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society.

These white people think this country belongs to them—they don't realize that they are only in charge right now because there's more of them than there are of us. The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedly-ass pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass Indians to do the same, and I intend to be one of those raggedy-ass Indians.

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place.

A privilege accruing to the majority ceases to be such.

Social change … almost inevitably leads to the rise of new political actors demanding a voice and a share of power.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

The paradox of decentralization is that it requires strong central leadership to make it work.

Revolution by the have-nots has a way of inducing a moral revelation among the haves.

People are seeking more power in the individual and less in government and institutions; they want more cooperation and less competition.

Most of my diversity conversations are had with the majority population, because frankly, those people are the people who have the most influence over everybody's career.

Social revolutions are never simple.