activist tactics Quotes

Protest is best used when it's part of a strategy that involves escalating tactics that build pressure on targets.

I want people to be confronted by the brutality of the Antifa movement.

If civil disobedience is the way to go about change, than I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco

If what you want is actual change, then what has to be built is a mass movement that is militant and can use direct action to slow or stop profit. A movement that can do that can demand whatever it wants.

The organizers first job is to create the issues or problems, and organizations must be based on many issues. The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.

The big companies are like steel and activists are like heat. Activists soften the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.

Airbnb is a much more effective protest than shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge.

The shouting, the overrunning of the Capitol, the sneaking in of Tea Party participants into the basement of the Capitol, the name-calling, the spitting, all of that... The Tea Party emerges as not only outrageous, but they have turned up the volume in ways that even Code Pink have not been able to do.

I locate a great deal of the power of Occupy Wall Street in the name itself, 'Occupy Wall Street,' or '#OccupyWallStreet.' It works because the name contains everything you need to know: the tactic and the target. The name is also modular. You can create your own offshoot in your own city.

The more fear confrontational activism can put into the heart of the political class, the better.

When you shoot for big stuff, you stay true to the movement. You fight unapologetically on the inside; that is a very, very powerful way to pass the radical solutions that are necessary to face the radical problems that you have.

Somebody referred to what I do as subliminal activism, which I like.

We'd like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us.

Civil disobedience is a stimulation for the fighters and a challenge to the opponent, in the present instance, authority.

People are not going to change because an activist goes around shouting.

Many environmental battles are won by delaying a destructive project long enough to change the conversation - to allow new economic, political and social dynamics to emerge.

Putting innocents at risk is not the way one makes a political statement.

Old radicals never changed. They just got law degrees and updated their bag of tricks.

I favor massive civil disobedience, among other things. It is not the only thing that is used to protest any grievance in society. But it is one of the most effective under certain conditions.

I like to tell the streets what the political climate is, and I like to tell any politicians that's listening what the streets think. And sometimes people get nicked up and bruised up, but I usually have a lot of good medicine for that.

Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.

“Denialism” sounds monstrous. It was coined decades ago to designate people who claim the Holocaust didn’t happen. Around 2005, climate-change activists appropriated the term and started to refer to their opponents as “climate deniers” (or, later, “science deniers”). This was an attempt to discredit them by linking them to Nazis without making any factual assertions whatever.

I organized tax resistance in 1965, with a friend. I kept at it for about ten years. I don't see it as a principle, it's a tactic. And I felt I had exhausted its potential as a tactic right about then, so I stopped.

But picketing - picketing for or against something, and handing out literature - these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.

The more visible signs of protest are gone, but I think there is a realization that the tactics of the late sixties are not sufficient to meet the challenges of the seventies.