Dolores Huerta Quotes

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?"

The people are learning that you cannot leave decisions only to leaders. Local groups have to create the political will for change, rather than waiting for others to do things for them. That is where positive, and sustainable, change begins.

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.

When I see my own people going through the tough times, it's a wake-up call. I hope my influence can impact someone else's decision to get out here and vote.

Be informed, ask questions, band together with your community, and fight at the local level. And make sure you take your local elections as seriously as the national ones.

We want to make nation-building a people's movement.

If there is going to be change, real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That's how change happens.

We need to reshape the movement as one of grassroots activists, and not 'professional activists' who populate the seemingly endless number of national animal rights groups. For many people, activism has become writing a check to a national group that is very pleased to have you leave it to them. Although it is important to give financial support to worthy efforts only, giving money is not enough and giving to the wrong groups can actually do more harm than good.

The little grassroots people can change this world.

The best education I received was working with people in the community on a grassroots basis. Because what it taught me was that ordinary people, when they are working together can do extraordinary things.

There is something about participating; it is almost my religion. If the world is still here in 100 years, people will know the importance of participating, not just being spectators. Millions of small groups around the world, that don't necessarily all agree with one another, are made up of people who are not just sitting back waiting for someone to do things for them. No one can prove anything, but of course if I didn't believe it had some kind of power, I wouldn't be trying to do it.

Leaders may inspire, but only when the people decide to act does the leader's vision become a movement.

I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.

I know one thing: that you can do a lot of things but if you don't educate people into conscious anarchism it gets frittered away.

Now people are really inspired to do a lot, and the fire got lit under our asses to be more politically aware and be more politically involved in our community and pay more attention to what's going on.

You need to remind people that you vote, you matter, and that they can’t succeed without your help.

Ordinary people can bring about change.

For we put the power in the people.

I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing, and activities on the ground, that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power throughout which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways, we still suffer from that.

Very great change starts from very small conversations, held among people who care.

Most of you didn't think that helping people share books would be a subversive act...Yet the fact is that you have chosen a profession that has become radical.

You can't expect people who didn't exist as a community at all until about twenty years ago to have formed a political movement. This attack on the LGBT community was very shocking to the people who consider themselves to be activists. They're basically playing in the sandbox, and there's a tank coming! And what are they supposed to do - use the plastic shovel to push the tank back? But since the homosexual propaganda legislation, people have really stepped up, educated themselves politically, and grown by leaps and bounds.

These people in Mississippi State, they are not "down"; all they need is a chance. And I am determined to give my part not for what the Movement can do for me, but what I can do for the Movement to bring about a change in the State of Mississippi.

We want to create, never mind the leaders or the bishops or chief rabbis or imams, or Popes. We want to create a grassroots movement where people will become attuned to uncompassionate discourse in the same way as we are now attuned to sort of gender imbalance in our speech.

Any realistic vision of change must be based on the notion of empowerment of people.