Quotes from Dolores Huerta

The leaders come up from the volunteers that do the work, and it's amazing because then they do these incredible things in their community that they never thought they had the power to make that happen.

My mother was a very wonderful woman. When she and my dad divorced, she moved to California and worked two jobs in the cannery at night and as a waitress during the day. But she saved enough money to establish a restaurant.

People were asleep, but I think they're waking up now. Trump has given everybody a good kick, and people are waking up and realizing they've got to get involved.

I always saw my role as getting LGBT to support the immigrant rights movement - which they did - and getting Latino organizations to support the women's movement, for reproductive rights. So that's kind of the work that I've always been doing.

If you haven't forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others?

Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.

We criticize and separate ourselves from the process. We've got to jump right in there with both feet.

As we've focused more on our food and where it comes from, people now have greater awareness of what's being put onto our food, pesticides, labeling issues, and consumer health.

That's the history of the world. His story is told, hers isn't.

Honor the hands that harvest your crops.

I hope people become inspired to become active in their community. That's the important thing.

Gloria Steinem in the women's movement. Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority. There are all of these great wonderful women I've met that are so inspirational.

We had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur.

I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.

Leadership is a choice one makes.

Let's teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

If we can just convince other people to get involved, this could make some major changes in our society. It's very exhilarating.

Professional farmworkers who know how to do a number of different jobs, whether it be pruning or picking or crafting, they see themselves as professionals, and they take a lot of pride in that work. They don't see themselves as doing work that is demeaning.

I wish I could say to all those people who consider themselves anarchists or radicals: Please join the nonviolent movement. This is how Gandhi freed India. If Gandhi freed India, we can certainly free the United States from our racism, misogyny, and bigotry.

We do need women in civic life. We do need women to run for office, to be in political office. We need a feminist to be at the table when decisions are being made so that the right decisions will be made.

My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that's an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.

The conditions were terrible. The farmworkers were only earning about 70 cents an hour at that time - 90 cents was the highest wage that they were earning. They didn't have toilets in the fields; they didn't have cold drinking water. They didn't have rest periods. People worked from sunup to sundown. It was really atrocious.

I remember as a little girl going down to the beet fields in the Dakotas and in Nebraska and Wyoming as migrant workers when I was very, very small, like, I was, like, 5 years old, I believe. And I remember going out there, you know, traveling to these states and living in these little tarpaper shacks that they had in Wyoming.

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.