Eve Ensler Quotes

We shall strike. We shall organize boycotts. We shall demonstrate and have political campaigns. We shall pursue the revolution we have proposed. We are sons and daughters of the farm workers' revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking bread and justice.

The idea of protest organizing, as summarized by community organizer Saul Alinsky, is that if we put enough pressure on the government, it will do things to help people. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking. But with globalization and the weakening of the nation-state, that kind of organizing doesn't work.

This is a movement. This is not Trump. This is not anything. This is a movement. Remember, it is a movement. We used to say silent majority. It's not a silent majority, it's really a noisy majority.

My advice is very simple: if you can win a small battle, it gives you confidence in the political process to take on bigger battles, and so it is very much a bottom-up grass-roots way of doing politics.

Civil disobedience's main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

Each of us should choose which course of action we must take; education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes, but let it not be said that we did nothing.

Non-cooperation is directed not against men but against measures. It is not directed against the Governors, but against the system they administer. The roots of non-cooperation lies not in hatred but in justice if not in love.

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

If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come through citizen's movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.

The lyrics stand today (1980). They're still my feeling about politics. I want to see the plan. I want to know what you're going to do after you've knocked it all down. I mean, can't we use some of it? What's the point of bombing Wall Street? If you want to change the system, change the system. It's no good shooting people.

By dint of that concern and because that society was willing to examine its particular reality, Solidarity could come into existence.

Our agitation, you know, helps keep yours alive in the rank and file.

The more visible signs of protest are gone, but I think there is a realization that the tactics of the late sixties are not sufficient to meet the challenges of the seventies.

There's a reason people pause their lives to engage in political activism and pressure their local political leaders. Because as a whole, even if you can't identify any one instance, as a whole pressure works and sometimes it starts with something as simple as pushing the button on the intercom.

I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.

They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.

There's a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn't have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

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.

Now we're in the midst of not just advocating for change, not just calling for change - we're doing the grinding, sometimes frustrating work of delivering change - inch by inch, day by day.

History shows that all protest movements rely on symbols - boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, flags, songs. Symbolic action on whatever scale - from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to wearing a simple wristband - is designed to disrupt our everyday complacency and force people to think.

No movement finding itself in this stage of struggle can operate by getting authority from the leading body of the political organs for even minor action that is taken and we don't even know in the case of the actions which have publicize whether they are in fact our people.

This administration and these folk who run Washington are no more interested in our welfare and our well being than the man on the moon. And we have got to start taking our destiny into our hands.

No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It's because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up and demand - demand - demand change.

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.