Public Mobilization Quotes

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.

When people generally are aware of a problem, it can be said to have entered the public consciousness. When people get on their hind legs and holler, the problem has not only entered the public consciousness -- it has also become a part of the public conscience. At that point, things in our democracy begin to hum.

Established citizens—doctors, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, etc. will be recruited initially as “Social Crusaders.”

The only people right now capable of mobilizing the public are talk show hosts.

This is a classic case of using the “bully pulpit.” We got the public to think about the issue. And more of them came to the same basic conclusion I had—that this is about fairness.

One of the powers of a sit-in is its visibility and potential to mobilize public opinion; the way the protest is reported in the media can have a powerful influence over its eventual success or failure.

Sharing experience and building public support for the full range of rights is more powerful than legal cases.

One of these days, someone smarter and younger and more articulate than I is going to get through to the American people just how really messed up the federal government has become. And when that happens, the American people are going to rise up like that football crowd in Cleveland and run both teams off the field.

I suppose I could have called in the whole of the Army, but what was the use? All I had to do was call in Main Street itself.

No matter how many shows or how much work we do, we are not going to make a difference. It's only the masses that will make a difference.

When you have no real power, go public - really public. The public is where the real power is.

Since it is impossible for the people spontaneously and universally, to move in concert towards their object; and it is therefore essential, that such changes be instituted by some informal and unauthorized propositions, made by some patriotic and respectable citizen or number of citizens.

We were very effective, and I was very effective, in shaping public opinion around my campaigns. But there were big stretches, while governing, where even though we were doing the right thing, we weren't able to mobilize public opinion firmly enough behind us to weaken the resolve of the Republicans to stop opposing us or to cooperate with us. And there were times during my presidency where I lost the PR battle.

The human species is now at a point where it has to make choices that are going to determine whether decent survival is even possible. Environmental catastrophe, including war, maybe pandemics, these are very serious issues and they can't be addressed within the current structure of institutions. That's almost given. There have to be real significant changes, and only really effective popular mass-based movements can introduce and carry forward such initiatives, as indeed did happen during the 1930s.