Enuga Sreenivasulu Reddy Quotes

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

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.

You have to try to build support around causes. It is uniting to campaign on a single issue, and it is never just a single issue; it's always more than that.

Democracy comes alive not when government does anything, because government cannot be depended on to rectify serious injustices. It comes alive when people organize and do something about it.

I'll never forget working to get my college, Wayne State University, to divest from the government in South Africa. This was the beginning of my activism, and the fight for social and economic justice has been a constant thread in my life.

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.

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish - people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people - and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

I came from a tradition of demonstrations and protests, and I really believe in them. I think they are powerful ways of bring people together, to organize, to raise awareness, and most importantly to empower people.

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.

Activism in the street is truth-telling, and organizing is talking to people for a specific goal.

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

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.

People may say 'What can I do? I'm only one person.' But we've proven that when we come together demonstrate, and speak our piece, there is no way the power structure can avoid being attentive.

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.

No one makes a revolution by himself.

Since we're each unique, if we've shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change. Revolutions that last don't happen from the top down. They happen from the bottom up.

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.

True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.

For a nonviolent struggle, there is no age limit. The blind, the maimed and the bed-ridden may serve, and not only men but women also.

When millions of people stand up and fight...they win.

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

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.

You Can't Kill the Spirit resonates with the voices and power of women around the globe who have refused to be either passive or violent but instead act firmly and imaginatively to oppose oppression in its many guises. A wonderful tonic for activists and a treasure for those who teach, these stories bring women's history to life.

I remember with strong feelings the families who joined our movement and paid dues long before there was any hope of winning contracts. Sometimes, fathers and mothers would take money out of their meager food budgets just because they believed that farm workers could and must build their own union. I remember thinking then that with spirit like that... we had to win. No force on earth could stop us.