Collective Empowerment Quotes

Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.

The dialogue is out there, the veil has been lifted. We all know that there's a ways to go. We're still fighting uphill battles, and you just have to hone in on making change, one dialogue at a time, one course of action at a time.

I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody?

Now is our time to change the world

We have to remember that we're no longer competing for anything anymore. We're not competing for life and death. Now we need to go back to when we would raise our children together and be able to have that strong unit of community, which is our strength. So women together, as a tribe, to me, are the strongest force. But we were put in a position to have to compete with each other, and that's got to stop. We've got to know that whenever that creeps up in our head, that that's not our true nature. That was something that was embedded in us, and that needs to start to go away.

Unless the people, through unified action, arise and take charge of their government, they will find that their government has taken charge of them. Independence and liberty will be gone, and the general public will find itself in a condition of servitude to an aggregation of organized and selfish interest.

Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

Without community, there is no liberation.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.

What we need are mental and spiritual giants who are aflame with a purpose . . . We're a race ready for crusade, for we've recognized that we're a race on this continent that can work out its own salvation.

The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main programme of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalise us in a way, like being put in a corner. But it would be better if there were more of us.

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish - people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people - and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education.

It means a great deal to those who are oppressed to know that they are not alone. And never let anyone tell you that what you are doing is insignificant.

It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation - that we're all in this together, that we all have a voice - and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities.

Our way out involves both resistance and renewal: saying no to what is, so that we can reshape and recreate the world. Our challenge is communal, but to face it we must be empowered as individuals and create structures of support and celebration that can teach us freedom. Creation is the ultimate resistance, the ultimate refusal to accept things as they are. For it is in creation that we encounter Mystery.

All power is lodged in, and consequently derived from, the people. We should wear it as a breastplate, and buckle it on as our armour.

We want to give a voice to all the good people of the South.

That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.

Reconquer the streets, the markets - the public spaces, with the same message of opposition: We are devastated, but we will not give up. With torches and roses, we deliver this message to the world: We do not let fear break us. And we do not let the fear of fear silence us.

Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.

There is room for only one Prime Minister, but for those who make the desert bloom there is room for hundreds, thousands and even millions. And the destiny of the state is in the hands of the many rather than of a single individual.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

For generations, the Jewish and African-American communities have stood together, helping each other overcome their greatest challenges and triumph in the face of sweeping discrimination, all while securing a brighter future for all of our children.