Quotes About Engagement

Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.

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

Yeah, not bad. You're starting to listen. But it's still too abstract Ã¢â'¬Â¦ like you're taking a survey or something. If you want to organize people, you need to steer away from the peripheral stuff and go towards people's centers. The stuff that makes them tick. Otherwise, you'll never form the relationships you need to get them involved.

And I say to you today that we need more folks in this country who are a good crazy….You can't tell what will happen when you get folks with some good crazy…going to the polls to vote!

Listen to understand rather than listen to respond.

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

maybe politics could be less about power and positioning and more about community and connection.

We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.

What's missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.

Wanting to be in politics but not of it.

It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn't a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

If more people spoke up, perhaps things might change.

Indifference is exactly what cynical politicians want from you. They're counting on it. Their success depends on convincing you that your vote doesn't matter.

a cynical electorate is a self-centered electorate.

That evening, after she'd run me through an exhaustive list of U.S. foreign policy errors that she insisted needed correcting, I suggested she might want to get out of the ivory tower and work with me for a spell.

But I had my legs beneath me now and was convinced I was right, particularly on the more general principle that America shouldn't be afraid to engage its adversaries or push for diplomatic solutions to conflict.

Take whatever question they give you, give 'em a quick line to make it seem like you answered it…and then talk about what you want to talk about.

That's why people become involved in organizing—because they think they'll get something out of it.

I had to ask strangers to join me and one another on real-life projects - fixing up a park, or removing asbestos from a housing project, or starting and after-school program.

When you make a commitment to a relationship, you invest your attention and energy in it more profoundly because you now experience ownership of that relationship

Sometimes we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts, and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of "negative" people.

you can't go around telling people, 'I'm on a mission to discover the purpose of life.' Not if you're hoping to prolong the conversation.

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, trowing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.

I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.