Political Organizing Quotes

I have my chops in organizing, and I know how to create political space through movement building.

It's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking.

When wage controls and other legal restrictions on Canadian workers of the government's only answer to that country's deepening economic problems, the labor movement's response has to be fundamentally political.

I'd been arrested many times by then. I'd been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].

Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.

I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them.

I value public service and I'm relatively good at organizing political causes.

I think the challenge for anyone in a visible industry, whether it's media, government, or political organizing, is to take serious criticism seriously and not to live in the shadows of the noise and the concern trolls.

Obama better understood community organisation and peer-to-peer communication than any recent candidate, and we are applying that lesson.

The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather then undermined democratic forces.

Often when I'm on TV, they'll ask what are the three most important things for people to do. I know they want me to say that people should change their light bulbs. I say the number one thing is to organize politically; number two, do some political organizing; number three, get together with your neighbors and organize; and then if you have energy left over from all of that, change the light bulb.

There was really interesting work going on, for example, in the Mississippi bayou, where there were some really exemplary health centers that also became centers with kind of political organizing.

I'm not a grassroots organizer; that is clear. I believe in a division of labor. I'm not trained to organize the grassroots, and grassroots has to come from the grassroots.

There are real possibilities of reaching many of the Trump voters: many of them in fact voted for Obama, believing his rhetoric about "change," and upon realizing that they were deluded, have turned to Trump. And will find that they are again deluded. That's an opportunity that can be grasped, by organizing, education, activism right now.

Folks, some of these town halls are clearly organized. But, regardless, there are potential warning signs that Republicans perhaps shouldn't ignore.We heard Democrats dismiss this anger at their town halls back it 2009 as, oh, that's right, AstroTurf movements. And then, they lost the House in a big way.

Americans take part in political activities because they believe that by doing so they can influence government decisions

I would love to see a real story about Fred Hampton.

I thought my parents were always having card parties - and they were - but they were actually also having meetings to organize people. My older sister would be part of youth organizing, and she'd have dance parties. People would be dancing and talking about how to improve their neighborhood.

I'm a raging leftist political activist. I've never had a spiritual thought in my life related to God. I'm clear that that's a human invention.

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.

Grassroots organizing tends to be most available to big campaigns, but it's actually most useful to small ones. You can't win a presidential campaign without going on TV, but you can win a local election simply by organizing your community. NationBuilder levels the playing field.

Gays and lesbians gained rights in this country though activism and organizing, creating political space and demanding change so that lawmakers and justices could do what they knew was right. That organizing allowed Americans to get to know gays and lesbians as our daughters and sons, our neighbors, and our friends.

Navigating a battle between partisan, progressive organizing and decentralized petition drives is, at bottom, like trying to choose between the Democratic Party and democracy. The ideas are on different planes.

In the past, when we were initially organizing to bring about changes, our elders had little or no political experience. However, today, most of those American Indian Movement organ-izers are the elders. They are quite adept at bringing attention to the public about any attacks upon our people.

A phone tree isn't an ancient form of political organizing, but you have to call every person.