Tom Morello Quotes

Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, it carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

When you look at the times in history when change was brought about, there were two factors: crisis and leadership.

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

You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.

If reforms do not come when people are at peace, of course, they have to come through violent upheavals, so as I looked out I thought: "Thank God, that this nation has had the courage to face the need of changes before we reached the point where bloodshed was the only way to achieve a change.

Progressive, radical, or even revolutionary change has always come from below.

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

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

Social change comes through people.

We did not have a revolution in order to have a democracy.

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

Great political and social changes begin to be possible as soon as men are not afraid to risk their lives.

Democracy is a revolutionary process.

Unless we make revolutionary reforms, some day — in some unknown serra — some unknown Fidel Castro will rise up in Brazil.

Together, together, my friends, we have begun a political revolution to transform America, and that revolution, our revolution, continues!

Especially in the sphere of social activism, I think we tend to unwittingly conceptualize progress or revolution as black and white and having a clear beginning and end.

Every reform means awakening. Once truly awakened, the nation will not be satisfied with reform only in one department of life.

Resistance is the first step to change.

We have the right of revolution. Revolution does not always have to be weapons and warfare; it's also about revolutionary ideas.

We accept the world in order to change it. If you do not accept, then what are you going to change?

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.

The Occupy Wall Street project feels like a burning ember that might light the torch of justice and inflame our longing for freedom.

The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.