Quotes About Movements

The rise of populism has steadily coalesced movements of millions of people around its divisive us-against-them rhetoric, motivating so many more people to become active political campaigners and party members to champion the case for liberal democracy.

The starting point of social movements stems from deep pain and intolerance towards loss already incurred and hence any gain including just voicing the injustice empowers the movement and everybody else around them.

Today, seemingly every well-educated person in America and Europe knows that populism is the name we give to mass movements that are bigoted and irrational; that threaten democracy's norms with their anti-intellectual demagoguery.

For this project I interviewed the Reverend William Barber, Fred Harris, and Jim Hightower, three men who were enormously helpful in explaining the reform tradition and the power of mass movements. There are moments with all of them that I will never forget, but the one I am truly sorry I could not work into the text was when Hightower showed me a framed Texas poll tax receipt from 1964, a memento of a thankfully bygone era.

Such are some of the non-praiseworthy incentives of those who would fertilize the future. And they are all pressures of one kind or another. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and cry to be released, just as our bowels cry to be released to avoid the discomfort of a fecal build-up. And who, if they could help it, wants the discomfort of a fecal build-up? So we make bowel movements to relieve this pressure.

What we've seen is an attempt by mainstream politics and politicians to co-opt movements that galvanize people in order for them to move closer to their own goals and objectives. We don't think that playing a corrupt game is going to bring change and make black lives matter.

I'm often asked - and occasionally in an accusatory way - 'Are you atheist?' And it's like, 'You know, the only 'ist' I am is a scientist, all right?' I don't associate with movements. I'm not an 'ism.' I just - I think for myself.

History is a chaotic system. The details can shift endlessly, but the overall shape remains constant. Make a small change in the past, and it changes enough details in the present that we would not have come together at exactly this place and time to watch exactly this scene. And yet the great movements of history would be largely unchanged.

A good painter has two chief objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul; the former is easy, the latter hard, because he has to represent it by the attitudes and movements of the limbs…The most important consideration in painting is that the movements of each figure expresses its mental state, such as desire, scorn, anger, pity, and the like. - quoted from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks

Do you believe in God? "I believe in the divine: Mendelssohn is divine. "I believe in grace: All natural movements are graceful. "I believe in the mystical mathematics of heaven, which is to say grace beyond the algorithm of causality." What about out-of-body experiences in those just returned from death's brink? "Hell, one has a vision of heaven all the time!

This was my introduction to mountaineering, and clumsy indeed were my movements as we moved off.

Ballet requires movements which are very unnatural. With every step, you do a circular movement of the hip. You turn out from the hip and make your knees point out to the side instead of forward.

Civil movements and riots are as old as human civilization. Long before Twitter was created, mobilization of the discontented was mouth-to-mouth, or even by 'smoke signals' to gather the uprising against established political power.

Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.

As the nation is aware, I have been doing charity movements through the Beautiful Foundation and Beautiful Stores, and carrying out projects to promote hope and governance of our society.

All his movements were lethargic, as though he had a layer of silk insulating his central nervous system.

I do not fear death, for death transforms visionaries into martyrs; converts noble ideas into powerful movements.

I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims.

Memory is a kind of accomplishment, a sort of renewal even an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places inhabited by hordes heretofore unrealized, of new kinds? since their movements are towards new objectives (even though formerly they were abandoned).

Change is not, then, a matter of "magical" thinking or waving a "wand"—it is about pushing ideas, building movements, and challenging the status quo.

Your natural tools are your thoughts, physiological responses, body movements, voice, and senses. They determine how you handle pressure, regardless of your level of expertise, abilities, or good intentions. People

Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state.

It is true that the aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge and at all events their exclusive possession of the law was a formidable impediment to the success of those popular movements which began to be universal in the western world.

He surprised me by his familiarity with details of movements and battles which I did not suppose had come to his knowledge. As he kept me talking for over half an hour, I flattered myself that what I had to say interested him.