Social Movements Quotes

Democracy comes alive not when government does anything, because government cannot be depended on to rectify serious injustices. It comes alive when people organize and do something about it.

Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.

One should be cautious about "general conceptions." I think a strong case can be made that activism today is as high as ever, perhaps more so, and is also taking new and significant forms. There has never been anything like the international solidarity movements that began to take shape in the 1980s, right in the mainstream, or the global justice movements that have become a very powerful force in later years. It's true that the society is highly atomized, which does induce a sense of hopelessness often - quite mistakenly I think.

I was in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas. I've argued for Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the United Farm Workers. I've been a radical for a long time. I guess it's too bad. I'd be more marketable as a right-wing redneck. But I got into this to tell the truth as I saw it.

We can't sit around waiting for big government, big business, big religion etc. to save us. We need to get informed and take inspired action.

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.

Change never comes from the White House. It comes from your house and my house.

Only force would produce social change.

That's what politics is. It's the story of what's happening, what does it mean, what's the conclusion, who are the interesting characters?

Mexico has experimented with political change since the late 1980s.

You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.

Nationalism is the most powerful force on earth today.

Progressive, radical, or even revolutionary change has always come from below.

All the big revolutions, whether it's the Industrial Revolution, the Arab Spring, those changes happened by economic and social shifts brought about by the people's voices, and those things weren't voted for. Most of our changes today are brought about through technology, not by voting.

Politics isn't only about government. Politics is about the people.

There's no shortage of great young activists.

Does the District Attorney believe ... that the gallows or guillotine ever settled an idea? If an idea can live, it lives because history adjudges it right. I ask only for justice …. The scaffold has never yet and never will destroy an idea or a movement. …Whatever my social views are, they are what they are. They cannot be tried in this courtroom.

Politics is about power, and it is about group power.

We are a representative democracy. But how did we get there? We got there through direct action. And that's enshrined in our Constitution and in our values.

Grass-roots politics, linking small-dollar fundraising to massive local volunteer organization, showed that it can rival the power of a right-wing machine comprising super PACs backed by entrenched interests and mega-donors.

People finally understood that the role of the social-democratic party rests on its conscious leadership of the mass struggle against the existing society, a struggle that must reckon with the vital, necessary conditions of capitalist society.

I have never been an activist for anything.

I’ve been kept busy trying to ward off congressional resolutions of sympathy for these groups.

At school, everything was left v. right, communists and fascists; what interested me was the discussion of identity, autonomy, federalism, and community.

Politics lives in people, ideas live in people, they live in the concrete struggles that people have.