7 Quotes by Frances Fox Piven

I believe in the necessity for struggle by people at the bottom of any society.

I propose that there is another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life.

The only way to change American society, and indeed I think this is true of other societies as well, is for people to discover the power latent in the cooperative roles that they play in a range of institutions.

I remember my father explaining, “A capitalist system is a dog-eat-dog system.”

I think that the question of how power can be exerted from the lower reaches has never been more important. It will ultimately determine whether another world is indeed possible.

I had no intention of becoming an academic. How could a person who was having trouble reading become an academic?

For a protest movement to arise out of traumas of daily life, the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.