Movement Success Quotes

The main problem is that for a boycott to be effective, you must first persuade thousands - maybe even millions of others - to go along, which is a lot of work and usually not successful.

I also think it's crucial to convey that the [Black] Movement largely succeeded because of the unwavering dedication of young people willing to risk their comfort, their safety, their lives.

So many great movements didn't succeed the first time, but people kept trying and trying and trying.

Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing.

The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice. It is perhaps impossible to understand the nature of a mass movement unless it is recognized that their chief preoccupation is to foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for united action and self-sacrifice.

One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.

Without our faith, we wouldn't have been able to succeed. On many occasions, before we'd go out on a sit-in, before we went on the freedom ride, before we marched from Selma to Montgomery, we would sing a song or say a prayer. Without our faith, without the spirit and spiritual bearings and underpinning, we would not have been so successful.

They've got a great tool in the Internet. If you've really got a good movement, you can see who likes you.

They are lovely people. All the political movements I’ve been associated with have consisted of lovely people. But what a successful political movement needs is not lovely people. Give me a mean son-of-a-bitch like Lew Atwater or Karl Rove. The Drug Reform people a lovely, stoned hippies.

A national movement, which does not include in its platform the demand for an economical change advantageous to the masses has no chance of success unless supported by foreign aid.

Social movements rarely succeed if they violate our gut sense of decency and moral proportion.

Selma was the turning point.

Faith without works is dead just as a movement without works is also dead.

It is hard to argue that the conservative movement is not having success.

The whole reason for the success of Dr. King's civil-rights movement was that it was not a movement for itself. The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all.

No civil rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.