Faye Wattleton Quotes

… 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.

One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed and decisively so.

From Gandhi to Mandela, from the American patriot to the Polish shipbuilders, the makers of revolutions have not come from the top.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.

For me, 'revolution' simply means radical change.

Revolution is not a goal in itself.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

All great revolutions are led by aristocrats.

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.

The revolution has its own laws: in the period of its culmination it pushes the most highly developed, determined and far-seeing stratum of the revolutionary class to the most advanced positions.

The powerful don't make revolutions

As the haves and have-nots split further and further apart, destabilization ultimately leads to revolution, not evolution. If we're playing the evolution vs. revolution game, we are closer to revolution than we are to evolution in my concept.

Where's the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows. The day before every revolution that's ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.

I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth.

Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

Once again, he who ignores the problems of revolutionary strategy would do better not to talk about revolutions at all.

Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is. ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.

A revolution is an act of violence whereby one class shatters the authority of another.

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.

While there's capitalism, there'll be socialism, because there is always a response to injustice.

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

Without alienation, there can be no politics.