Cornel West Quotes

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

No matter what the issues are, it has to be handled at the grassroots. When you take part in something, even though that movement may lose, the juices start flowing and you feel you count. You count. Well, that's pretty important.

I'm not a grassroots organizer; that is clear. I believe in a division of labor. I'm not trained to organize the grassroots, and grassroots has to come from the grassroots.

I decided to become a community organizer ... Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

Movements aren’t built on leadership but on the movement itself — of individuals taking that first step from inertia to action, as if passing through a doorway

Our Revolution has been the keeper of the flame doing the vital work of building a grassroots movement that leverages the people's agenda.

I'm an organizer at heart. Organizers know that giving information, being in front of people, talking to people, to build our movement for the kind of country that we see is the most important thing.

I think that if the political and social movement groups and organizations that operate in this country today had the same kind of energetic commitment that the medical marijuana people have, many things could change in this country.

I'm very cautious and very concerned about what I have initially seen, but I also believe we've got to organize like we have never organized before.We talk about it, but realistically, we've got to organize at the grassroots level.

We are the great grassroots campaign of the modern era, built from mousepads, shoe leather and hope.

If the government or the parties won't address our needs, we will. It's about direct action, even civil disobedience.

My own view - and I'm very open to hearing other perspectives - is that this movement-building needs to begin at home, in local communities. It isn't about trying to launch a brand new national party overnight. It's about people in communities coming together across lines of difference, bringing with them their movements, their families, and coming together and saying, "How can we together build a movement of movements here at home? What would that look like? What do we want to do right here in our communities?"

Any protester knows that the only way activism works is to get the people on your side.

You can make the case that slacktivism is important because it makes people feel affiliated to a movement and be part of it, and talk about it.

Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the 'demands' of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world.

Activists are generally doers - rather than watching television and thinking about the world they will put there energies into doing something 'active' to change the (political) situation.

Activism could be defined as activities engaged in by individuals to change there of others situation.

I'm incredibly impressed by people who organize to achieve a goal, and believe that they can make a difference and then go ahead and do just that. I think it's incredible.

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.

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.

The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community.

What you learn from my life is, first of all, that anybody can be a leader. You can be a leader. I wasn't born that way - I developed it, I worked at it. And also that the grassroots can organize and take on all the powers that be and defeat them. That is the lesson.

The first step in community organization is community disorganization.