Quotes About Activism

demonstrators were attacked by the government-backed vigilantes.

Change won't come from the top, Change will come from mobilized grassroots.

I've been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.

Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues

communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for Blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.

not just Dr. King but John Lewis and Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash. In their heroic efforts—going door-to-door to register voters, sitting down at lunch counters, and marching to freedom songs—I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up.

In their heroic efforts—going door-to-door to register voters, sitting down at lunch counters, and marching to freedom songs—I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up. This was true democracy at work—democracy not as a gift from on high, or a division of spoils between interest groups, but rather democracy that was earned, the work of everybody.

Lewis and Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash.

In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi's campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.

Katie printed out a wire photo and left it on my desk; it showed a group of young protesters in the Egyptian square hoisting a sign that read, YES WE CAN.

Madiba reminds that democracy is more than just elections.

La gran mayoría de los oficinistas despedidos se tragaron el sapo, como se suele decir, y aceptaron que les dieran pensamiento positivo en vez de la nómina mensual y la seguridad de antes. No tomaron las calles, no forzaron ningún cambio en la política, no se presentaron en su ex oficina con una pistola.

The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.

The article I haven't enclosed, but you know the kind of thing: "in attendance were Trotskyites, Teamsters, Socialist professors and old-line Quakers, the crackpot fringes of public opinion, hoping to arouse draft resistance while praying for an easy way out." In other words, the kind of thing you and

She remembered the wanted posters for Joanne Little, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur. She blushed at putting herself in such important company, then wondered if the sheriff's office appreciated the distinction.

Today's national movements, women's and blacks', seem more interested in being players in the white male club than challenging the white male patriarchy.

What I am proud of, what seems so simply clear, is that feminism is a way to fight for justice, always in short supply.

As with Randall Terry and other anti-abortion leaders, women simply did not figure into [Roeder's] equations. If all the abortion providers were dead, the problem would be solved, and he'd never have to think about those who sought to end their pregnancies through illegal or dangerous means.

Rallying to the cry of "free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men

But the idea itself sprang out of a certain kind of lived experience--on the ground, as the activists still like to say. It came, in part, from seeing human beings buried in conditions that defiled both the dead and the living.

No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better

The fact that mean measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is ok. That the environment got better by itself or that we can just sit back and relax for the cleaner environment that we enjoy today, we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulation, treaties and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.

Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?