Ted Cruz Quotes

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?"

Trace out also individuals in every region, inform yourself about them, seek them out, secure that in their own districts they shall canvas for you, and be, as it were, candidates in your interest.

I campaign all the time.

Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out.

Grass-roots work is not flashy, and rarely celebrated on the national media level, but that is where change begins.

In my four years as a state legislator, I went to dozens of nontraditional events - everything from bird watchings to tree giveaways, neighborhood cleanups to self-defense clinics for women - going where people are instead of asking them to come to me. It's how I learned about their struggles and how legislative decisions affected their lives.

One of my main jobs is to cultivate advocates and activists.

When I see Kickstarter, I don't see a company. Instead, I see a social movement. I see people doing things for people.

In the past, young, talented architects worked together to form a strong social agenda and communicate with a larger audience. That's what today's architecture community should be.

Connecting with people is an important part of my role [as a politician].

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

Movements of people create change - not just any one person or organization, but when lots of people are in motion around a shared vision.

People who have come of age from the '80s on have experienced a form of activism that's very sterile and annoying. It's not that much fun to be an activist. That's partly by design. They are sterile protests and anonymous e-mail activism - not the kind of thing where people fall in love, form friendships for life, and see the change they make right in front of them. I've seen that, when people start to experience doing these things together and the power that it has.

People are murdering each other without any recourse... So we need to get in our communities and work from the inside out.

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.

We need to be asking for the vote in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we're asking for the vote from.

In the end, the key ingredient for public life is imagination. You imagine something better, you try to bring the people with you.

The artist draws the people. The whole idea is for people to dig themselves, just mingle around meeting different other people. That's cool.

From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.

Relationships are at the core of any political system and economic system - any family - and I think we drifted away from understanding that in our country. The people-to-people level is critical. It is ironic, though - we can text with anybody in the world, we can have a videoconference with anybody in the world, but [there should be] an even higher premium on showing up and getting to know someone.

For me, policy is best when connected to the roots, and roots are best when connected to policy. So I encourage you all to stay connected...and walk with real people while doing the activism. Lord knows we need folks who are engaged.

I'm not sure if my involvement in causes, benefits, marches, and demonstrations has made a huge difference, but I know one thing: that involvement has connected me with the good people: people with the live hearts, the live eyes, the live heads.

Most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia.

We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.