Raoul Peck Quotes

Social conditions that spur large numbers of people into action are ignored in favor of a Hollywood version of history focusing on one conquering hero. Since a movement for social change is embodied in its leader, death of the leader means death of the movement.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

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

Before we had the Internet, I organized a fax campaign against the first Iraq war. We blasted faxes to the hotel where James Baker and Tariq Aziz were having their final meeting before the two sides went to war. Much more recently, I co-founded Avaaz and Get Up, which inspired the creation of Purpose.

Revolutions are not push button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exists a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action.

It takes a lot of punishment to be able to do anything to change the social order.

I can't help but believe that at some time in the not-too-distant future, there is going to be another movement to change these systemic conditions of poverty, injustice, and violence in people's lives. That is where we've got to go, and it is going to be a struggle.

The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms.

I think the reality is that there's a role for everybody to play in the work of social justice and that we have to organize everybody. That means that Silicon Valley has to be organized, the fashion industry has to be organized, the formerly incarcerated have to be organized, the teachers.

Rallies, marches on Washington, protests, et al. are pointless if there is no action to make them mean something.

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.

You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course. There must be strategies, the researchers, the professionals to carry out the program. That's our role.

You don't disarm any white community by confining yourself to any particular method. If you want freedom, then you should get freedom like Patrick Henry said, by whatever method is necessary.

Thank God for Occupy and thank God for 'The Daily Show,' Colbert and the rising up that's going on around the world.

I became active in politics because I saw the possibility, if we all sat back and did nothing, of a world in which there would no longer be any stages for actors to act on.

There is a weapon we can fight with. That is the weapon of political action.

If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible.

It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something.

Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.

At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this. It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.

Fortunately, no country was ever more suited for anarchist agitation than present-day America.

I grew up with protests, marches, demonstrations, struggle. But I come from a clan of community workers.

There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action.