Wadada Leo Smith Quotes

I want a prepared, organized, orderly and resistless revolution.

How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?

Instead of trying to change people, we could change the world.

A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. . . . We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

To revolt within society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to improve their life within the prison walls; and such revolt is no revolt at all, it is just mutiny. Do you see the difference? Revolt within society is like the mutiny of prisoners who want better food, better treatment within the prison; but revolt born of understanding is an individual breaking away from society, and that is creative revolution.

The whole world is in the throes of a new birth. Anything done for a temporary gain would be tantamount to an abortion.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter.

While our responses to the problems facing us immediately are also important, we cannot forget to carve out the future of Japan ten or one hundred years into the future. In doing so, we must not resort to superficial measures. Instead, it is imperative to engage in true reforms that ascertain the state of society we seek to achieve.

Have you ever thought that radical ideas threaten institutions, then become institutions, and in turn reject radical ideas which threaten institutions?

We don't need new discoveries or new inventions to reverse this trend. We have the tools at our disposal to reverse it. All we need is the motivation, the opportunity and the willpower to do what needs to be done. ...With this report, we have a very solid road map that we need to make these goals real, to solve this problem within a generation.

Reform is a work of time; a national taste, however wrong it may be, cannot be totally changed at once.

I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

All change starts with a distant rumble at the grassroots level.

If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.

Neither one of us believe that you can fix the culture from within by just throwing money and people at the system. There has to be a systemic change within the system.

Money is not going to organize the disadvantaged, the powerless, or the poor. We need other weapons. That's why the War on Poverty is such a miserable failure. You put out a big pot of money and all you do is fight over it. Then you run out of money and you run out of troops.

Once we link up and network, there will be new institutions, new beginnings, and a change in the economy because capitalism is destroying many people's lives. It's just one leap to think in a different way.

I figured if I could get really good people who were going to be able to have a big impact in the world over the next decade to come together once a year for ten years and actually sign a pledge to take action themselves, if we did that every year for ten years we could do a lot of good in the world. That's the difference between my meeting and any other. If you don't want to promise to do something, don't come to my meeting, stay home.

That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.

There's something really happening and really moving, and it's exciting and it makes me very optimistic because it is going to be the engine for how we really combat climate change. Which is strong communities.

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on.

The reality is that changes are coming... They must come. You must share in bringing them.

I would like to see policy makers and international donor agencies realize that it is not enough to give money for demonstration projects. From the very beginning plans should be made for the scaling-up of successful innovations.