Ralph Nader Quotes

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.

It will be a comprehensive response. The ID issue is one of them. It will make sure that Home Affairs has the capacity to reach people and to make sure that the people themselves know that they have got to get these documents and where to go to get them.

The little grassroots people can change this world.

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?"

I and you and everyone else has to be a political activist.

The inconvenient truth that our lazy media elites do so much to ignore is that Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren are much closer in their views to the vast majority of ordinary Americans than the Bloombergs or the Bidens. They are the true centrists, the real moderates; they represent the actual political middle.

American liberals are an external part of Israel's conscience, and when it disdains them, it becomes a harder and more isolated place. The support that Israel has gained from millenarian American conservatives is no substitute, in part because such allies aren't persuasive global advocates for Israel.

What the Bernie campaign showed us was that you could out-raise a well-funded opponent with grassroots donations, and you could out-voter-contact them, too.

What we have got to do - especially with younger people, especially with people not heavily involved in the political process - is to make sure that every morning, afternoon, and evening, they are seeing the presentation of issues that are relevant to their lives.

The Michelle Obama that her old friends remember, that people knew in Chicago, she was a really incisive social critic. She knew how to drive an argument home. People liked her both in the workplace and socially because she was so frank.

What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.

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

It's the reason why I am always interested in engaging in people who are pushing us and pushing against the status quo. But having been an activist, the only thing that I'm always encouraging activists to do is, once you have raised the issue, and even through controversial means, you have to come behind it with an agenda and the possibility of reconciliation if power meets your demands.

We have to get back down to basics. We have to start organizing at the neighborhood level to get people educated to vote.

"The life of the union depends upon more people getting to share the limelight, because with the limelight also comes responsibility and with the responsibility comes a little sharing of the load." "There isn't enough money to organize poor people. There never is enough money to organize anyone. If you put it on the basis of money, you're not going to succeed."

We are intent on building a movement. The next step is grassroots town meetings. We must keep alive the dialogue around the covenants.

Democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time. Most people's daily lives are just about surviving. Most people don't have time to really study [crucial] issues.

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.

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.

A more just world is possible. In most of the global issues, and also in so many of the development issues I'm involved in in our region, the young people that I am working with are seizing the tools at their disposal and trying to use them well, for issues far larger than their immediate personal benefit and concerns. That's what gives me hope.

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.

You keep plugging away--that's the way social change takes place. That's the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.

What I can do is to go out and talk about the problems and solutions, make people aware of the scope of the problems, get them to become advocates for a turnaround, and convince them to develop an action plan, targeted to their community, to deal with young people. [They need to] find out what the kids want to do - dances, midnight-basketball leagues.

We need to come together sometimes and show our strength, so that the Donald Trump administration at its 100th day is under no illusions that people are somehow in a fog. We know absolutely what this guy is doing, and boy, are we pissed off about it.