John Lewis Quotes

Our Revolution has been the keeper of the flame doing the vital work of building a grassroots movement that leverages the people's agenda.

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

You can't build a lasting political movement based on hostility to government.

Only the people can build world history.

There were communists in the civil rights movement who played a very helpful role.

I do not believe as Martin Luther King did, that the arc of history bends towards justice. I see the arc of history bending towards chaos or the unknown.

Civil rights activists and union activists shared not just common values and objectives but also common enemies.

My personal belief in doing Brand New Congress is that the movement needs something to focus on that's constructive.

You have to join every other movement for the freedom of people. Therefore join the movement as individuals against anti-Semitism, join the movements for the rights of Hispanics, the rights of women, the rights of gays. In other words, I think that each movement has to stand on its own feet because it has a particular agenda, but it can ask other people.

I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

The movement for equality and justice can only be a success if it has both a mass and militant character; the barriers to be overcome require both.

The great news is that that sort of group of people and that sort of sensibility is beginning to become more active again. And I think partly it just has to do with the time. It has to do with the culture of resistance. The necessity is for us to pull together and to speak up and to make work and be visible.

I think my experience at the University of Chicago, working in the civil rights movement, working in the peace movement, working with community organizations, did a lot to influence the politics that I have.

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.

I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.

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.

I just don't feel that we've traveled very far in the realm of social equality. There just seems to be a little bit of unrest. And sometimes I think that happens when you really feel like something's about to change. Right before the moment of lift off, sometimes things feel a little bit unhinged, and that's what it feels like to me right now, both as a woman and just as a human on the planet as an American woman in America. I feel like we're on the precipice of change. I feel a little nervous.

A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.

In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

President [Barack] Obama is a man who had certain advantages because of the civil rights movement.

With the passion and the vision of the Berners [Sanders] coming into the Greens - we call it berning green - and the events that I'm going to that are being created around the country right now, it's the Bernie folks who are showing up in huge numbers along with the traditional Green. It's very powerful.

As Bernie Sanders said himself, it's a movement, not a man. And that movement continues to move into our campaign.

Let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, and acting man, but explains him.

I think that America could not become America until it dealt with the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans in the last century. It had to. America could not become America until it dealt with that. And did it deal with it perfectly? No. But it had to confront it.

Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.