Connexions Quotations

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Activism Quotes



Before anything happens to me I want to know that the seeds have really been planted, that things will carry on changing.
- Wangari Maathai


Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.
- Karl Marx - Karl Marx


I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.
- Studs Terkel


I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would also be free.
- Rosa Parks


Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
- Wendell Berry


Once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.
- Studs Terkel


One of the things past movements can tell us – in detail, not just in general – is that people have always resisted injustice, and always sought to create a world based on values of community, sharing, freedom and justice.
- Ulli Diemer


There is also the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement.
- Ella Baker


We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that struggle doesn’t always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many others in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization.
- Grace Lee Boggs


We know that without solidarity nothing is possible, that with it nothing is impossible.
- Eugene Debs


We need only look at activities of the thousands of people working in grassroots groups across this country, and around the world, to see that people do join with others to block what they see as harmful and to fight for what they consider to be desirable and just. When they do, that which seemed impossible to achieve starts to become possible.
- Ulli Diemer


We’re going to fight racism not with racism, we’re going to fight it with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.
- Fred Hampton


What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.
- Wendell Berry


Whatever rights one thinks there ought to be, or whatever rights people are said to have, the rights that people actually have are achieved and protected only by struggle. Rights are won. And they can be lost.
- Ulli Diemer


Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.
- V. I. Lenin


You are not expected to complete the work in your lifetime. Neither must you refuse to do your part.
- Jewish proverb - Talmud


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To learn more about Activism, explore the Connexions Subject Index Activism/Radicalism page and the Activism vs. Organizing page.