Bill McKibben Quotes

Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even - or perhaps especially - in authoritarian regimes.

Baltimore is a beautiful city. I started doing a lot of community organizing back in 1999 and met so many great people in neighborhoods all across the city. And that was an invaluable experience.

I always emphasize the historic role of people of color in organizing and protesting to achieve justice.

Public service and community organizing and movement building is such a part of my DNA that it's really hard to separate it.

What it takes to get people from liking and sharing and retweeting to organising is a hard and long process. Technology has really changed the game in terms of how people participate and what they decide to participate in.

For a black activist, for an activist of all walks of life, the Internet has become this kind of meeting place where we can exchange ideas, where we can learn from each other, where we can get inspired about new ways that we can make changes within our own communities and own homes.

Not only do Imgurians get the opportunity to find the content that they love but also serve up their favorite content to others who visit their profiles.

We spend more time talking about what's happening on Twitter than we do talking about what kind of organising people are doing in the cities we live in.

I thought my parents were always having card parties - and they were - but they were actually also having meetings to organize people. My older sister would be part of youth organizing, and she'd have dance parties. People would be dancing and talking about how to improve their neighborhood.

While everyone's purpose may be different, with social media we all have that platform to create the change we want to see in the world, and I spend a lot of time encouraging others to step up and use theirs.

With Black Lives Matter, we knew from the very beginning that it wasn't just going to live online. We were like, 'We're creating this thing and then it's also going to live with black folks on the street and protests and organizations.' It was very important for us to use the hashtag as a way to have a larger conversation and as an organizing tool.

There are all the activist groups on every imaginable topic - solidarity groups, environmental and feminist groups - sectors of these movements do very valuable work.

At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, young people all over the world are demonstrating against a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. These demonstrations have and currently are being met with state-sanctioned violence and an almost pathological refusal to hear their demands.

The racist rhetoric from politicians is inspiring people to organize, as more people see what happens by not getting active.

It is my hope that people today will see that, in another time, in another period, when we saw the need for people to speak up, to organize, to mobilize, and to do something about injustice, we came together.

I use social media not to ask new people to like my stuff. I use social media to connect with that one reader who likes my stuff.

Organizing is an educational process. The best educational process in the union is the picket line and the boycott. You learn about life.

Providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change. I am far lazier than that.

Democracy depends on people speaking out, and in times of great crisis, on people creating a commotion.

I think having not only personal connections with friends and family I'm able to pull from, but having a connection with so many people through social media, it also feels like I have a relationship with those people that follow me. And feel that what I'm going through, they've gone through something similar, and that's why we've connected. And they're the ones that make it into that body of work that represents them or that time in their life, because we've found each other.

I admired the earnestness of these people, many of whom had joined Greenpeace and marched for noble things in their youth. But I didn’t share their hatred of the establishment. After all, the establishment had given me so many of my favorite things: Nick at Nite, the New York Knicks, Stephen King, Taco Bell, Green Day. The list went on and on.

The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations: It’s a process, not an event.

Twitter's a great way to tell people across the world what I care about and, hopefully, motivate them to join me in furthering my causes. It's also a fantastic medium to hear the ideas and opinions of people I might not otherwise get to meet.

Martin Luther King would celebrate the symbolic status (of having a black president), but he would examine what the real substance was. And if he saw that poor and working people were not at the center of public policy, he would be deeply, deeply upset.